The Fox News propaganda machine has been ramped up to portray $700 a week teachers and other government employees as overpaid, violent, journalist-hating wastrels milking the public dry while letting the Chinese beat our progeny at math.
Leave it to Jon Stewart to point out how this contrasts with how some of the same mouthpieces Fox News treated the multimillionaires on Wall Street who wrecked the economy, got taxpayer trillions to bail them out, and went straight back to their $10 million and $50 million paychecks.
That’s how it works.
— Ladies and gentlemen, I present the greatest, most cockamamie Bloomberg News headline of all time:
Marijuana-Like High Helps Ex-Trashman’s Syn Battle Solid Sex
It’s almost completely unintelligible without reading the story. But I must admit it made me want to read the story.
— Here’s a very interesting nugget from a Women’s Wear Daily brief on the Financial Times‘s booming business:
A combined subscription for print and online is $33.96 a month, and a premium subscription to online only is nearly $30 a month. Overall, FT.com’s paid circulation is up more than 50 percent, to 207,000, a third of total global paid circulation. Chief executive officer John Ridding said advertisers are paying the same rates now for print and online.
It’s great news that the FT‘s paywall is working so well, but the really interesting thing there is that Ridding says ad rates are the same for print and online.
The major problem with the digital transition, of course, has been that online ads bring pennies to the dollars print ads bring (or brought). If the FT is getting similar rates for online, that seems like a very big deal.
I’ve got a question out to the paper and will update with any more info.
UPDATE: An FT spokeswoman says WWD got it wrong: it’s not true that ad rates are the same for print and online.
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.