And I, for one, welcome our lolcat overlords.

Your point is well taken as your intro itself is lifted from the immortal Jerom Criswell, who intoned the words "The future: Where you and I will spend the rest of our lives" back in 1959, in Ed Woods masterpiece, "Plan 9 From Outer Space"...

They said the same thing about books, 2000 years ago. Durn things were gonna cheapen knowledge, since real learning was only what could be memorized in ones own, tiny, brain.

Who among us wishes they won that fight?

If technology has a slight tendency to make people dumb, don't overlook the fact that the exact reverse of that is even more true.

Around the same percentage of people will do stupid things with technology now as they did when the latest thing was chiseling on stone. Most of the ancient tablets they uncover are long groveling praises of some long-forgotten leader. The rest are inventory lists.

The one captioned

"...and then Toby heard the 'snap' of the rubber glove..."

cracks me up every time.

And this brave new world vision is different from the last five or so years - how?

"the last five years or so"

Delete that and insert " the history of the press." Thanks.

Lest I be misconstrued, I value and love the press, but I do believe everyone can write. F the elitism.

I don't think salon.com counts as a newspaper...

It's neat to read TMW when it's not about Bush.

the hairdos.

I don't think the point is whether "everyone can write". I think the point is whether everyone can afford to maintain a news bureau in Beiruit.

Exactly.

And ellwort, "nonplussed" means "perplexed," not "unimpressed." Is that what you meant? Are you perplexed? Or unimpressed? I couldn't tell by your somewhat cryptic messages.

Who needs to know stuff anyway? We're Americans!

Isn't it fascinating that this is published in an online news website?

The real irony is that it's published by an online news site that recently launched a big initiative to get people to blog (eg, Open Salon).

On a more serious note - this entire point of view is just silly. No one buys newspapers because they are inconvienent. They are large, cumbersome to carry, hard to read, prone to flapping in the wind, getting soggy, smeared and laden usually with three times the weight in advertisements as they are with actual content.

Why the hell would anyone want to deal with that when they can have Google in the palm of their hand?

GET OFF MY LAWN!

I've never been much for comments, but this cartoon is really bringing out Teh Stupid in the readers here. jjm whatever, where is this cartoon a defense of selling soggy inconvenient woodpulp and ink? it's about the "news industry." Your example of Google is exactly what the cartoon is saying -- when everyone is linking to the news but no one is paying to report it, how exactly are we better off? You do understand that Google doesn't actually have its own news staff, right? How do you know what's going on in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or your local city council, if instead of flawed journalists, you have -- excuse me for shouting -- NO ONE REPORTING AT ALL??

Don't be so defensive. Tom's not making fun of commenters like you. But maybe he needs to.

Just think of how many blog posts begin with, "So I was reading in the NY Times.." or "According to CNN.."

What exactly will bloggers do when there's no more MSM to leech from?

Each day brings us closer to Idiocracy.

OK. I knew what "nonplussed" means when I stuck that comment up.

The framing of the press as a Members Only "ownership society" club doesn't square with the excellent tension-releases Tom's put forth in This Modern World for - eh - seventeen years? At least since I first started following TMW in a college freebie rag. The same elitist perspective surfaces in some of the columns of Ted Rall, whom I likewise love.

"Honey? I think I hear a prowler downstairs. I think he's after our intellectual property!"

Oh - and GG. What does "comprise" mean?

How can anything be "comprised of" some other things?

And how can anything "pre-exist"?

(Not your problem: These are my own dull-axe burdens.)

When we have ENTERTAINMENT ...... the electronic Coliseum.

I must take exception to your ...but I do believe everyone can write comment.

Not only is it incorrect in the have you ever seen what passes for English papers these days sense, but it is also incorrect in the have you read today's fishwrapper, er, newspaper? sense.

You then say F the elitism. I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that professional journalists are elitists? Or that professional journalism is elitism? Surely you don't believe that some random person off the street can automatically write something that is well-researched, insightful, and worth reading?

Yes, it is true that there are a lot of people who are not professional journalists who can write well, and a lot of professional journalists who can not write well at all. But it is a very long stretch from there to but I do believe everyone can write. F the elitism.

Future events such as these will affect you, in the future.

Yes, it's quite amazing the number of people who haven't quite connected the dots yet. Good bloggers are those who are able to quickly correlate reports from a variety of sources and deliver a picture that is bigger than any one of the parts. However, they are only able to do this because of the reporting done by the initial journalists. (I wanted to shout that, as an earlier poster did, but resisted.)

Hate the MSM all you want, but there were some good people still working, still digging up stories that might otherwise remain hidden. Holding out hope that bloggers will fill the void just is kind of delusional.

You talkin' to me?

Yeah, I've seen some of the frantic & convoluted utterances (forget about grammar or diction) in the papers of - say, Harvard students - when they feel overpressured to impress with prose. I've heard 'way truer expression in subway cars and diners, neither of which have Admissions Departments, and neither of which might be termed "highly selective" like the places that took our money (but, yes, featured great teachers who were great when they just loved teaching) when we were undergraduates.

Y'know - in wartime you can pay not to die. How much does it cost to speak?