It’s been a busy week for the dying media | Mulshin

A few years ago, a sailing buddy of mine, a captain, and I took a trip to Barnegat Bay.

In Bayville we moored at a waterfront restaurant that served hamburgers and beer. We were done with both when a fellow sailor came up to us and asked for a favor.

He pointed to a large yacht anchored in the middle of the bay. He was too big to use the dock, so he needed a lift for himself and three female passengers, all of whom were quite beautiful.

“I’m a porn star in Europe,” he explained, pointing at his passengers. “This is my B list.”

It was one of the most memorable phrases I’ve ever heard. I used it to respond to people who asked nagging questions about when I would leave this dying profession.

“I would only do this if I could go back to my old job,” I said.

“What was that?” they would ask.

“I was a porn star in Europe,” I answered.

This is not true, of course. But it would shift the conversation to a less painful topic.

What to say about journalism in an age when a man can call himself a “Carlamagne God” and be accepted as a political commentator?

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Not that I have anything against Charlemagne. He is no worse than hundreds of Internet personalities.

But he and his fellow bloggers/podcasters have a big advantage over print media. They just need a microphone and an Internet connection to reach as many people as an entire newspaper, which requires reporters, editors, buildings, printing plants and a fleet of delivery trucks.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Advance Media announced last week that The Star-Ledger and four other New Jersey newspapers would no longer print after Feb. 2.

Honestly, I’m surprised we got this far.

When I first joined the Star-Ledger in 1995, we might as well have printed money. Management was hiring so quickly that we ran out of space in our spacious Newark office.

We were doing so well that our leading editors decided to start publishing on a new computer platform called the Internet.

There were many recommendations on the Internet. You can instantly communicate via email, even from another country. You could access a wealth of information, including almost any newspaper or magazine article you wanted.

But a problem arose: how to generate enough income to pay for the aforementioned presses, buildings, trucks, etc.?

“Hits” was the answer I received from the visionaries. Internet hits will replace paper advertising, which brought in so much money.

The Internet has proven to be an excellent means of selling advertising. But once advertising hit the Internet, who needed newspaper articles?

As it turned out, there weren’t that many people. It was only a few years before newspapers started firing people rather than hiring them.

If you look at old photographs of crowds on the subway, you will see a lot of people holding newspapers.

Now they are holding iPhones in their hands.

Publishers have tried all sorts of tricks to make up for lost revenue. One way to do this is to become a billionaire.

I tried, but I didn’t have enough money.

Jeff Bezos was luckier. He made a lot of money as the founder of Amazon. This allowed him to buy the Washington Post in 2013 and put it on sound financial footing.

But by this year, the Post had lost $77 million.

This created a whole new form of financial problems for the newspaper.

His workers rebelled when Bezos ordered Post not to support the presidential race between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

If such approval were to follow, it would probably not have much influence. The readership is overwhelmingly liberal and democratic.

This was proven when, according to the Post, about 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to protest the disapproval.

This highlights another problem with newspaper funding. One Washington insider told me that employees expect Bezos to treat the Post as some kind of vanity project that spreads a liberal viewpoint to the unenlightened.

But in an opinion column Monday, Bezos made it clear that’s not his goal. His goal is to restore trust in the mainstream media.

“The lack of trust is not unique to The Post. Our sister newspapers have the same problem,” Bezos wrote. “Many people turn to spontaneous podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.”

This is true. And there is a simple solution to this. Hire more conservatives.

Nineteen Post columnists signed a letter objecting to the decision to disapprove.

The Post needs the same number of conservative writers to support the opposing view.

Call me Jeff.

I’m free after February 2nd.

Unless I go to Europe.