I think this is true BUT, as the partner of a journalist, most of this “chortling” is simply frustration. They’re frustrated by the changes, uncertain about their future, but most of all, enormously angry at perceived incompetence by various levels of management. Many of them have seen changes coming for a long time, and many of those have tried to do something about it, either by blogging, retraining to shoot video as well as photo, or developing multimedia packages and projects. At the same time, the insitutions themselves, with some notable exceptions, have been extremely slow to invest the kinds of resources it would take to make these new technologies work. They’d love a working revolution, as long as it doesn’t cost any more money, involve hiring more than a handful of new people, and involve more than a week of retraining. It’s like relying on a week-long seminar to transition train conductors to airline pilots. I think for many, a healthy dose of that schadenfreude is directed at the people within their organization who get paid more money to make bad decisions. Take the San Francisco Chronicle; it’s been in the red for a decade, and Hearst squeezed various other network papers of profits to subsidize it, without any long-term solution to how they would turn it around. It was money down the drain that could have been spent girding up for the digital push. And if you’ve been working for them for ten years, at this point, it’s just pointless to get angry anymore. Why not laugh? It doesn’t get any more “grim” than that.

Freddie, please take a walk and get some sunlight tomorrow. Commenters will make mildly nit-picky corrections all the time. If you’re the blogger, it’s best to keep it mature and not make a veiled reference to what a loser the commenter must be. I’m really not saying this to be mean, but you come off as quite a bit angry in both your posts and comments (ie more than just passionate about your arguments). You are also sometimes needlessly disparaging of the person with whom you’re arguing. I really suggest that, no matter your beliefs, you avoid allowing political arguments to consume you and make you so visibly angry at others. You’re a good writer, but I really feel that this is affecting your writing.

The point your are missing is that the advent of instantaneous, paperless publishing rendered the value of the business model a fraction of what it once was. Craigslist did not do that, the inevitable march of innovation did that. As surely as gravity sucks down.

This is the same lesson the record companies, after spending enormous sums to buy politicians to defend their business model, after spending enormous sums to buy researchers to develop DRM schemes that were doomed to fail, and after spending enormous sums to spy on and sue their customers, have finally learned; their business model is obsolete, and the market value of their product is now a fraction of what it once was. It took Apple — after years of to experiments, most of which failed — to discover a new, workable business model and force the record companies to face reality.

The newspaper business model is based on one thing, selling ads. When an advertiser’s access to “eyeballs” was dear, the value of that ad space was valuable, and the business model sound. Now that access is ubiquitous, ad space is worth a fraction of what it once was, and the business model is no longer viable. Gravity, sucking down. Again.

If a hundred years ago society had done everything possible to save every buggywhip making job in America, there still wouldn’t be any buggywhip making jobs in America. The newspaper business is not any more sacred than any other industry whose time has passed. Deal with it, and stop shooting the messenger.

You are correct. People who who think misusing words is unimportant should not be corrected. They should be ignored.