"Our aim, to swat liars and leeches, hypocrites & humbugs, demagogs & dastards"
-- The Yellow Jacket
Moravian Falls, N.C., 1919
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Doom-ed
The title indicates the way that Bruce Pearson pronounced "doomed" in "Bang the Drum Slowly." And it's the way this news makes me feel: Even Reader's Digest may be going into bankruptcy. How bad can it get?
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I used to subscribe to the Digest many years ago, but they kept sending me stuff I didn't want, and even when I sent it back (their condensed books were almost always fiction books, even though I had filled out a form saying I wasn't interested in fiction), they kept demanding payment. (The Digest has been using lawyers for many years, I can assure you.) So I let my subscription lapse.
Since then, I've bought an occasional copy, and IMHO, the magazine has become progressively worse over the years. The latest issue featured an article on how to get and/or keep a job in these hard times -- which was useless. (The article said that for every legitimate home-based job out there, there were 58 scams. They left out the ",000,000" after 58.) Even the jokes are bad. So I'll shed no tears if this publication goes under.
The Internet is the perfect medium for free exchange of information, "free" being the thing that is undermining the old ways. It's worrisome - not Readers Digest, but NY Times, RM News, McClatchy (the last vestige of investigative journalism?), San Francisco, Miami, Seattle - all the other newspapers. You guys have yet to come up with a viable business model to survive on the net. That's a problem for all of us.
2 comments:
I used to subscribe to the Digest many years ago, but they kept sending me stuff I didn't want, and even when I sent it back (their condensed books were almost always fiction books, even though I had filled out a form saying I wasn't interested in fiction), they kept demanding payment. (The Digest has been using lawyers for many years, I can assure you.) So I let my subscription lapse.
Since then, I've bought an occasional copy, and IMHO, the magazine has become progressively worse over the years. The latest issue featured an article on how to get and/or keep a job in these hard times -- which was useless. (The article said that for every legitimate home-based job out there, there were 58 scams. They left out the ",000,000" after 58.) Even the jokes are bad. So I'll shed no tears if this publication goes under.
The Internet is the perfect medium for free exchange of information, "free" being the thing that is undermining the old ways. It's worrisome - not Readers Digest, but NY Times, RM News, McClatchy (the last vestige of investigative journalism?), San Francisco, Miami, Seattle - all the other newspapers. You guys have yet to come up with a viable business model to survive on the net. That's a problem for all of us.
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