Paying for news

Apple has gotten in bed with several old school publishers. Apparently, Apple intends to turn the iPad in to a pay for absolutely every little click platform. I bet Al Jazeera still gives it away for free. That is the issue with people having to pay for direct content. They will drift to the cheapest content. At some point the only free content will be that content with a cause or bias.

If I pay for news, can I sew if I feel they do not give me what I was looking for or if their new format does not satisfy my needs? Wheat if they say something I don't like and I stop subscribing? The move to put content behind a pay wall is going to make news outlets more bias, not less. People will shop around for news outlets that tell them what they want to hear instead of what needs to be said.

Here is how I figure things will pan out. Some people will pay for news. Some people will not. Some people who do not pay for news will complain that they are not an informed citizenry and there for, the constitutional protections over a free press will not apply to the pay news. Government will use this to control the press through intimidation or out write imprisonment.

When your news choices amount to The Jihad Press, Zionism Daily, and The Mormon Chronicle, you have lost some choices in the matter of being informed. In the end of it all, the American people will simply be left out in the cold with no idea or path to find out why they have no control over their lives any more.

At the very same moment as all the news is desperately diving behind a pay wall, something else is happening. The idea of printing something on paper is finally going away for good. Yay for the trees, but there are some other side effects to this.

Right now, someone who cannot afford a internet, a daily paper or cable or magazines for their news can pick up some free TV stations in some cases and may even be able to <gasp> read yesterday's news paper. This will not happen in the near future. 

Right now you can peruse a library for past copies of papers from a million years ago. We may have to wait until things are out of copyright or pay a fee to the holders of the estate just to read or look at the article. It will be a whole other issue if you want to make copies or take something with you. They will want a percentage of what ever endeavor you intend to use the information to create or benefiter. Teaching a class? Those kids can't learn for free. They need to sign a binding slice of their future over or no dice. They are not aloud to think the answer in that information without paying for it in advance.

I give you permission to learn from this blog and use that data to your advantage. Then again, I have a bias and a cause. Would you read if I didn't?