Here now the news [this space for rent]

Congress is now focusing on the future of newspapers. Here is a radical thought: stop thinking of newspapers as something on paper, at least as a daily news device. You want to money again? Start charging for your internet content. The Wall St Journal seems to have it right, giving away dome content for free online, or a the first few paragraphs of an article, and then charging for the full content. Right now I pay roughly $10 a month to read the WSJ electronically, which is considerably less than I would pay if I bought the physical paper each day. There is no reason why other papers, such as the NY Times, couldn’t do something similar.

Yes putting the free news all the time genie back in the bottle may be hard but there is no reason it needs to be painful. Smaller newspapers could combine efforts, perhaps charge a more nominal fee for access to many papers owned by the same parent. Or, at the same time, any newspaper could make their physical weekend papers more attractive to advertisers by allowing weekend subscribers, who probably pay more than $10 a month, full access to the newspaper's web site at no additional cost. Perhaps a publisher would limit some of what appears in print, such as a magazine article, from the website for a day to encourage online only readers to subscribe to the hard copy? Under this plan the newspaper could survive and even make a few extra bucks in advertising on the weekend when circulation tends to be higher.

Of course that wouldn’t work for every paper. Many are going to have to find some other way to charge for content and to focus on more local news. I’m sure more mergers and closings are in the near future as the new business models sort themselves out. One thing that is important though is to make sure we still have a press that investigates and reports on possible misadventures by our politicians and citizens.

Zero tolerance = zero inteligence?

I just read a sad article in the Washington Post about a teen killing himself because he was about to be expelled from high school because he possessed marijuana in violation of the school's zero tolerance policy. Very sad, but then I started looking at some of the reader's comments. Wow. The venom in some of those posts. He was a kid and kids make mistakes. While I don't feel there should not have been consequences for the student's actions, ruining his life by expelling him for just smoking pot is a bit extreme. We're not talking about a kid selling drugs to his classmates, we're talking about a kid who was only harming himself.

We've all made mistakes in our lives, especially when we were younger, where the only person harmed was ourselves. Fortunately most of those mistakes didn't have long lasting consequences.

Re-reading the posts in that thread and I'm still not sure if some of the responders are just trolls or the type of people so afraid of every little thing that could go wrong that we've legislated ourselves into a nanny state with limited rights so we can feel safe from the bad guys; you know, the type who live in Iowa but were fine with New Yorkers being searched on the subway so they in Iowa would feel safe from terrorists, regardless of whether New Yorkers were potentially having their Constitutional rights violated.

Whatever happened to using the brains we were born with and looking at every situation individually? If the kid was a seller, expel him. But if he was just a user, then place him in some appropriate program so he can continue his education and move on from this mistake. Get rid of these zero tolerance policies and let justice prevail.