Imagine if a comedy script is submitted to a movie producer. It would be about a major newspaper conglomerate so desperate to turn around the plunging circulation numbers of its various newspapers that it hires a wacky radio consultant as a Chief Innovation Officer to help turn it around. The radio consultant is so strange that he believes the way to improve the circulation numbers is to ensure that the newspapers have soul.
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
In yet another example of how the dinosaur media is completely unable to cope with the new web technology, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's editorial blog (or "blob" as editor Earl Maucker described it accurately last summer via a typo), The Slant, continues to generate almost no interest from the readers.
In what seems to be an almost comical pattern among South Florida newspapers, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel has once again failed to apply the political party label to disgraced and imprisoned former Broward county sheriff Ken Jenne. Can you guess the political party to which Jenne belongs? I'll give you a hint. It is the big D.
With many newspapers in a state of free-fall as far as their readership numbers go, it is interesting as well as entertaining to watch how they attempt to combat that situation. In the case of some such as my hometown newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the effort to adjust to the new realities of the Web is both awkward as well as laughable.
This has been happening so much in the past few years that it is reaching the point of redundancy to report on it. A politician is caught up in a major scandal and/or corruption. The media dutifully reports on it but leaves out one key factor. The political party of the fallen politician. And can you guess which political party is ALWAYS missing from these reports whenever such an affliliation is conveniently purged from the news stories?
