Episode 29: Print Media

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 29: Print Media .ass file - download the video off of YouTube and play with your media player of choice .ytt file - feed the subtitle file to your YouTube(!) in this convoluted manner Corrections (please!) to haitch dubya ei zed you you dubya at the google mail service NOVA: I had an idea for the cold open here once we're going, though. JUSTIN: I had an idea for the cold open too. NOVA: Oh, go ahead. JUSTIN: Uh, although, although, let's go with yours, I was just gonna talk about how-- LIAM: Ooh, I liked yours! Ooh. JUSTIN: Ah, well-- NOVA: What's yours? JUSTIN: No, mine was... You know, I used to work for a, a newspaper, which was at, um, Drexel University, right, NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: and, you know, it was a good... I was the editor-in-chief for a while, which was fun. We had an exciting time, our business manager killed a guy. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Um. LIAM: Literally. Literally-- NOVA: And you got, you got to slam you desk and demand pictures of Spider-Man. LIAM: Can we, can we, can we say his-- no, we don't need to say his name, but yeah, he killed a guy. JUSTIN: No, we don't nee-- JUSTIN: yeah, he killed a guy, yeah. LIAM: He, he killed a guy, yeah. But, uh, this is merely specul-- NOVA: Like, on purpose? LIAM: This is merely speculation, but that guy probably deserved it. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: No, that's what I was thinking too, is he probably did deserved it. I was like, yeah, this, this guy was like, the, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: one of the nicest guys I've ever met, I had no idea he had a concealed carry permit. Um... JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] LIAM: See... what'd you say? He's... he's the only one. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: He's the only one who didn't go around telling everyone, because, as you know--it's actually a legal requirement when you get a concealed carry permit, to walk up to every, uh, every person you see and say, "hey, just so you know, I have a concealed carry permit," then-- NOVA: Have you seen those, like, fake cop badges they have, for like, concealed carry holders? LIAM: No, I haven't because we're not allowed to get them. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: No, I... I feel like the purpose of a concealed carry is to not tell anyone you have it. NOVA: Yeah... you-- JUSTIN: Um, but I think, like, the moral of the story is, like, don't... Don't go fighting people because you don't know who's packing heat. Although you probably do, LIAM: I... JUSTIN: 'cause everyone who has a concealed carry permit announces it to everyone. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Don't fight, don't fight a guy with a concealed carry permit... ..,like, uh, t-shirt, and like, hats, uh, don't--don't do that shit. LIAM: I feel like I remember a, uh, a friend of mine, saying--like, talking about the shooting, and being like, "yeah, it was like... "right outside Savas," uh, "in West Philly," and I was like, yeah, but like, again, like, it's normally fine, how often is... the business manager of The Triangle gotta... gotta merk a dude? NOVA: [laughs] Well, at least once. JUSTIN: Yeah, it happened once, and like, LIAM: (?) got one. JUSTIN: you know what, I, I assume, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: like, I assume that guy... I mean, if you're good at it, LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: you can, like, kill multiple people, you know, if you... NOVA: Yeah, Richard Kuklinski, another, another American Po-- JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. NOVA: Polish-American excellence. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Rocz' Polish idol. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Exactly. Famous Polish-American. [laughs] NOVA: ...You are the Richard Kuklinski of podcasts. You just get hundreds of 'em out of the way, just, "done", and, like, everybody's incredibly impressed with you. JUSTIN: Yes. Um... NOVA: Meanwhile, my cold open idea was that I was gonna do The God Damn News theme song... and then I was gonna be like, "Live, from Philadelphia, "WTYP Action News." JUSTIN: I like that too. LIAM: ♪[news jingle]♪ NOVA: You literally do not have to-- ♪[news jingle]♪ NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: Alright, well, I'll just go fuck myself. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] ♪[news jingle]♪ JUSTIN: Alright, well, we have... ...several competing cold open ideas. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] We just do them simultaneously, just layer them over each other... Uh... JUSTIN: Well, we've been recording the whole time, NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: so we have both of them. NOVA: Yeah, perfect, we can just... we just do them both, we'll do a split-screen, we do like a picture-in-picture, and it's just completely incomprehensible because you get two sets of audio at the same time. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Yeah. I always, I always feel bad for Rocz, just 'cause like, one of these days, I'm just gonna go absolutely buckwild with my audio, moreso than I ever have, and then I'll just talk backwards or something, NOVA: Hmm. LIAM: I'll start backmasking... Shit's gonna get real unpleasant. NOVA: Yeah, the first podcast to be recorded 1/3rd in tongues. JUSTIN: Yeah, I was about to say, LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: speaking in tongues, handling dangerous snakes, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: um... What-- Praising The Lord, you know. LIAM: ...Goddamn, goddamn Protestants must be stopped. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is a... this is a... a Bible-based podcast. But anyway. NOVA: That is true. JUSTIN: Welcome to Well There's Your Problem. A podcast about engineering disasters. Hi, I'm Justin Roczniak, I'm the person who's talking right now... LIAM: Hi, Justin! JUSTIN: My... [laughter] JUSTIN: Wow, this is an AA meeting now, great. Um... NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Nope, nope, nope! Moving on! NOT doing that shit again, moving on. JUSTIN: ...I haven't-- NOVA: [laughs] "We surrender ourselves to a higher podcasting power." JUSTIN: Yes. My pronouns are "he" and "him". Okay. NOVA: Uh, [November Kelly], my pronouns are "she" and "her"-- what, I don't get a "Hi, [Nova]"? Nothing? JUSTIN: [lethargic] Hi, [Nova]. LIAM: Hi--hi, [Nova]. NOVA: [laughs] What's up, everybody. LIAM: Yeah, yeah. LIAM: [YouTuber voice] Hey, what's up, YouTube?! JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] "What's up, gamers?" LIAM: Uh... Oh, fuck, is this my third (?) oh shit. JUSTIN: "What's up gamers?! I'm recovering from alcoholism." [laughter] LIAM: Uh... Go listen to Trashfuture, it's a very good podcast, I have decided I got on Trashfuture, NOVA: Yeah, sure. LIAM: Uh... NOVA: Just, uh... LIAM: (?) Uh, my name is Liam Anderson, I am @oldmananders0n on Twitter, [sub note: that was his old handle; at the time of writing (early February '23) you can find Liam @notliamanders0n on Twitter.] uh, my pronouns are "he"/"him", and before we really get underway, I do want to actually talk about... uh, what we've been doing for the past, what, week and a half or so? NOVA: Hmm. LIAM: About the bonus episodes? JUSTIN: Yeh. Uh, yes. LIAM: So, uh... If you... aren't aware, when you listen to this, uh... I think through the month of June, but we may need to talk about that, uh, if you donate to one of the bail funds or a mutual aid fund, or something in that neighborhood, ...DM us the receipts so you can get the bonus episodes, and I wanted to say, as of this recording, which is June 8th, 2020, y'all have raised at least $5,000. NOVA: That's incredible. LIAM: ...Going through the receipts, um, JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: it's probably more than that, that was absolute, like... quick count. NOVA: Mm. LIAM: I just wanted to-- NOVA: And for--I mean, for, for your money, which there is no lower ceiling on, like, you can, like, give a dollar, you get... LIAM: Yeah, but-- NOVA: every bonus episode, from here to eternity, basically, 'cause LIAM: Right. NOVA: we just put the playlist out. JUSTIN: Yes, so, LIAM: It's, yeah-- JUSTIN: you get all the bonus episodes. LIAM: oh, are we doing that? NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, that's what I've been doing. LIAM: Uh... Okay, cool. NOVA: And like, literally, like, that's an astoundingly good deal, but the fact that... the fact is, that people weren't giving, like, a dollar, or five dollars, LIAM: Yeah, you... NOVA: I got a, I got a thing for like... "Oh, hey, I just sent $750 to this bail fund..." LIAM: Yeah, I got... two for $1,000, and... I wanna give a special shout-out to the guy who donated $666,66. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Hell yeah! LIAM: Which, I got that email when I was shitfaced drunk, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: and I wanted to tell you, personally, how much I liked that. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah. No... it's been, it's been very wholesome, it's been a very nice time, getting all of these messages, and thinking that, "huh, maybe we can actually do some good with, uh, "with our podcast, when we're not doing..." uh, um, "a Well There's Your Problem-to-fash pipeline." JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Yeah, and any of you come... become fascist, I personally will beat your ass. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: That's not even on the Patreon, that's the free tier, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: I will personally come and beat your ass. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. So, what you see-- LIAM: Square up, motherfuckers. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: What you see, on the screen here, is a page from the Philadelphia Inquirer, page A12, Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: What you might notice here is a very bad headline. NOVA: I see that. LIAM: I do notice that, I do notice that. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Um... LIAM: And a guy wearing a Knicks hat, in my fucking city. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...Ah, fuck, that's not good. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] [through laughter] I like that that's{ your objection... LIAM: That's-- NOVA: Oh man, yeah, no, this is-- JUSTIN: ...I just realized, the real disaster here, actually, is the column flow; 'cause it goes down, and I'm sure it goes down below that, then it starts-- LIAM: Oh God, no, oh boy... JUSTIN: IT STARTS UP AGAIN UP HERE. LIAM: Oh God. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: This is a horribly laid out page of, of... The God Damn News. JUSTIN: I was about to say. LIAM: You thought reading Hebrew was bad. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So... [laughs] Alright. So, we're not doing The God Damn News today, because the subject of today's episode is News. Um... NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: ...And this was recently, ♪[news jingle]♪ ...one of the few times we do like a, um, LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...an episode about contemporary subjects, as opposed to something that happened 70 years ago, right. We're gonna talk about... how shitty headlines like this make it into the newspaper... [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] Well... [laughs] JUSTIN: How the hell did this happen?! [laughs] NOVA: ...Somebody... whose, like, whose dad is important gets a job, and they type something into a computer, and then they send it across to a printworks, and a print guy prints the thing onto some paper a bunch of times, and then a bunch of podcasters get very upset, and then this happens. LIAM: Functionally shits in their own mouth, yes. JUSTIN: Alright, that's the episode, next episode's on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster... NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. So... So, so, this was published, uh, last Tuesday-- well, when this comes out, it'll be two Tuesdays ago-- um, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this is from Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Inga Saffron, who is good, uh, usually. Um... NOVA: [laughs] Well, like, people don't write the headlines above their columns, is the thing. JUSTIN: Yes, yes, people, people don't write their own headlines, um... LIAM: Right, right, they don't, they don't. JUSTIN: And the actual article, ...I think it was published a little soon, I think the concept of the article makes sense, you know, buildings can be rebuilt, uh, lives can't, uh, but will the buildings actually be rebuilt; and there's some examples from, you know, civil rights era-riots and protests where... those neighborhoods never really recover, that's up on, like, Ridge Avenue and Columbia Avenue. LIAM: Mmhm. JUSTIN: Columbia Avenue is now Cecil B. Moore Avenue, um, you know, of course, you know, we say, like, you know, ...these shops are all insured, so... the losses basically mean nothing-- I mean, that doesn't necessarily count for smaller businesses, um... you know... and of course, we gotta start talking about reconstructing some of these areas at some point, you know. Bail funds are the start; at some point, some of these neighborhoods are gonna need help getting back on their feet. So, you know, as... as... things continue, you know, we'll discuss, you know, NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: maybe instead of donating to bail funds, you might wanna donate to reconstruction funds. NOVA: We'll... We will be keeping... LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: a close eye on this, and we will be harassing both you and, like, various NUMTOTs online JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: to, like, uh, throw money into things. LIAM: Mmhm. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Uh, the other thing I wanna say is actually a shameless plug for Rocz. Which is your, uh, Black Wall Street episode, talking about sort of... rampant destruction in neighborhoods that never really get a chance to rebuild. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. LIAM: Whether to... ...what is essentially a race war, you know, or other means, or talk about, you know, as we've talked about, some of the destruction of cities... in places like New England, um... that were... entirely along racial lines, uh, and absolutely fucked over poor people; those cities are still... scrambling pretty hard. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. And, you know, there's some, there's some commentators out there, especially on Twitter, you know, who might say... you know, the... protesters, rioters, looters, whatever you wanna call 'em, you know, they liberated the proletariat from capitalist depression, by looting Ahmed's Corner Grocery Hoagie and Cold Beer store. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Um... But, you know... I think, you know, there's folks on that block who probably would disagree, 'cause they like having the convenience of having, you know, being able to go down the corner store and pick up some cold beer. You know, even if Ahmed is like, I don't know, like, a small business tyrant or whatever, right. NOVA: Yeah... a hoagie kulak. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] Ooh(?) NOVA: I mean, yeah... but like, burning down a Target is different from, like, burning down somebody, uh... LIAM: Ahmed's hoagie store, yes. NOVA: Yeah, Ahmed's hoagie store, but like, I think that's also a distinction that we saw a lot of people who were rioting make, is... JUSTIN: Oh yeah. NOVA: uh, like... LIAM: Yeah, absolutely. NOVA: ...this is--these are the businesses that we want, these are the ones that we don't want, uh, because... people... can tell, people live there, people know what's, like, what's gonna recover, what isn't, and what can afford to lose, Iunno, like, an Xbox out of the fucking back, uh, as opposed to, like, a bunch of hoagies, and hoagie-making equipment. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: What is a hoagie? JUSTIN: a Hoagie? A hoagie is a... it's just like a... a subm-- LIAM: Like, you would know it as a "sub", probably. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Mm. LIAM: Yeah, uh... JUSTIN: A sub, a hero, a grinder. LIAM: I, I will also say, ...while we're at it, uh, Wawa's hoagies are bad now. And I'm not telling you what to do. But, uh, you should probably liberate some deli prices. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: ...This is the thing that finally gets, the, like, FBI to kick your door in... is inciting violence against Wawas... [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: ...The fucking sandwiches are bad now! That's, that's absolutely true. ["FBI OPEN UP" audio clip] People always-- I didn't like that. I didn't like that at all. [laughter] (?) I was just like, "Goddammit". NOVA: Yeah, we've actually managed to cancel a drop in real time. JUSTIN: So, you know... I mean, with, um, with businesses destroyed, you know, uh... especially in the pandemic, a lot of these places may not be able to easily recover, and that's where, you know, there's an opportunity for capital to consolidate, you know. Uh, the hoagie store becomes 13 stories of ugly condos with a Chipotle on the ground floor, you know. NOVA: Mm. LIAM: Or a bank branch, maybe it's a bank branch. JUSTIN: Maybe it's a bank branch, yeah, exactly, do you want that? NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: That's another... NOVA: ...The Target that burns down never reopens, but like, uh, the Target down the road, just sort of increases in loss prevention intensity, JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: and everybody now lives in a food desert, and they have to, like, travel that much further to get surveyed while they're buying groceries. JUSTIN: Exactly, or like, you know... ...The bank branch opens, and then suddenly, all the mysterious ATM explosions happen, um... NOVA: [laughs] NOVA: That was, that was the single best part, because, like... the first couple of days of rioting, I was just like... smiling nonstop, but particularly, the moment that really struck me, was, um... the bit where like, some guys, some like, security consultant, some polo-necked dipshit was like, quote tweeting a thing about people trying to get into the ATMs of the bank, uh, and was like, "Man, unless they're bringing dynamite, they're not gonna get anything," LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: and then the next tweet was, uh, "Multiple explosions heard from some kind of a... bomb?" [laughs] JUSTIN: The thing I don't understand about the Philly explosions, because of course, we could hear 'em here, is that... you know, they said it was dynamite from people trying to break into ATMs, but like, dynamite is not that regular, NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: Right, and you hear, "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom," you know. LIAM: No, but that was--and there was a lot of it. JUSTIN: There was a lot of it, yeah. LIAM: There was a looot of it. JUSTIN: And other people said it was LRADs, and it's like, no, that's not the sound those make. [laughs] LIAM: That's not the sound that LRAD makes, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. ...It's, uh, it's definitely, like, none of-- I think it was mostly fireworks. You know, it's like... NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: you know, the normal, like, the neighborhood getting paranoid about fireworks, 'cause I assume... there's not a lot of police out, you know, to go catch you for setting off fireworks... [laughs] Right now. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: You can just do it, it's fine, it doesn't matter. NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: "Fireworks Liberation Front"? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: I had firework-- people are like, fireworks-crazy in this city, I had fireworks shot at me when I was biking down 56th Street one time. LIAM: I've had a... I've had fireworks shot at me, yeah. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] Yeah. NOVA: I mean... that happens here too, except they shoot them at like, the windows of houses, LIAM: Yeah, (?) straight, um... NOVA: so like, you'd just be minding your own business and... "boom", and then, like, all the windows rattle. It's cool. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] LIAM: Yeah. I... JUSTIN: So-- LIAM: That statute of limitations... has expired. Uh, I used to go out to a field in York, and just light off fireworks, 'cause I knew the guy who owned the farm, and he didn't give a fuck what I did. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: That was, that was a great way for me to release my teenage aggression, was just like, every, you know, five minutes, just get another one of the fireworks, like, I had bought, or eventually, this guy started buying, and this was back, this was back when Pennsylvania wouldn't let you buy the good stuff if you were a resident. So I never asked the questions, but yeah, no. We should, we should allow people in cities to have a field where they can just set off fucking fireworks and shit. NOVA: Yeah. I agree completely. JUSTIN: ...That's how we repurpose the golf courses. Anyway. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: That's wha-- JUSTIN: So... ...Yeah, this article, you know, I don't think it's bad, I think it was poorly timed, certainly. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: But the headline made it very bad. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: Um, again, Inga Saffron is good, especially that time she called out... Stu Bykofsky, at his retirement party, for associating with American expats in Thailand, NOVA: Euuuh. JUSTIN: who moved there for... cheap sex. Um... NOVA: Oh no. LIAM: (?) JUSTIN: And then printed it in the newspaper. [laughs] NOVA: Wow. [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. LIAM: Yeah, most of the time, Inga rules pretty hard. JUSTIN: Yeah... Inga's good. She also pisses of the urbanists a lot, which is fun. Um... NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, yeah. Usually very good. I think this article is poorly timed, and the headline is a major problem, right, so... How does a headline like this happen, right? And obviously, like, you know, one of the answers is systemic racism, right, you know, well, that's... ...that's easy to say, but, you know, we have to kinda go into that, we gotta pick it apart a little bit more, like, you know, headlines are not chosen by the reporter, usually, they're chosen by people who do... layout, especially print layout, right. And that's determined by space constraints, that's determined by style requirements, right. Um... 'cause sometime-- NOVA: Yeah... and look at what a beautiful layout... they have produced. LIAM: Yeah. [laughs] NOVA: There's like, extremely fucked column layout, JUSTIN: Oh my Goood. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: The headshot, like, dividing the column in half on the way down, the caption on the right with a bunch of whitespace under it. JUSTIN: The justification here where it says "Chestnut", right... and that's... "Walnut and Chestnut" right here; this, this is an abomination, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: right, 'cause there's just this all empty space right here, LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: you coulda shoved this up or down... ...I can't imagine this is like, the best they could've done here. But also, it's page A12, like, no one cared. [laughs] LIAM: So, it's like--yeah, you know, exactly. JUSTIN: So, you know, but, for like, a long answer as to... How did this happen? Right, I think we gotta go into, like, the history of newspapers and sort of the rise and decline of the print newspaper, um, the enormous undertaking that it is to produce a print newspaper with a circulation of millions of copies everyday, NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: and how... botch jobs like this happen. Um... NOVA: Yeah... How the newspaper went from something... that started wars, and ended wars, but mostly started wars, to, uh, a collection of the 20 worst accounts you're aware of on Twitter, all having horrible takes at once? JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] LIAM: Fuck you, Tom Cotton. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, in this episode, we're gonna talk mostly about the backend of newspapers, right, as opposed to, like, you know, the frontend, where the journalism happens. [laughs] NOVA: Ah, sports! JUSTIN: Yeah, that, or, like, uh... LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...Yeah, sports is the back end, 'cause it's like, basically, you know, you turn the newspaper over, and then you see the sports there. As opposed to--it's like the second front page, honestly. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: ...That's how we organized it when I worked at the student newspaper. You know, it's basically a second front page, where you could read about the important stuff, sports. [laughter] JUSTIN: So, alright, I mean, the backend of the newspaper does, of course, um, influence the frontend, like, how the paper is printed sometimes influences the reporting, so I... I think we should start by going way back, as far back as we can, to antiquity, right. Uh... NOVA: Yes, ancient Egyptian newspapers. JUSTIN: Yes. So... LIAM: ...Ancient tablets complaining. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: Room of complaints. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, the first general contractor, LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: very quickly followed by an exposé by the first journalist. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. Well, one of the first, like, newspapers, what you might call it, was called the... Acta Diurna, right, and that's, uh, in ancient Rome-- NOVA: "Daily Act"? JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Hmm. Okay. JUSTIN: And this is like a... a series of engraved stone or metal tablets, that would be posted in public... places in ancient Rome, right, and that... it was, like, the government's official account of the news of the day, or the week, or whatever, you know, 'cause it took a long time to make these things, right. Um... NOVA: Mm. Just a guy, just hammering out, "Conquest of Cisalpine Gaul Still Going Great," for the 50th time in a row. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] Um, so... in ancient China, they also did-- ancient China had, like, something like the printing press well before the Europeans did. Um, which is... one of the weird... narratives of the Gutenberg printing press is, you know, this is, like, the first... printing press, it's like, no, the Chinese figured this out a long time ago, right. Um, you know, they had, like, similar government "newspapers"; I'm doing air quotes here, "newspapers". Um, Those were, like, printed on silk, again, NOVA: Oooh. JUSTIN: they're very limited circulation, 'cause these things were-- NOVA: Fancy. JUSTIN: Yes, very fancy. Uh, and, you know, so these are... these were, like, limited circulation, this is, like, inbetween, you know, 0AD and, like, the 700s, 800s AD, when, you know, these sorts of things were circulating. Uh, not much circulation, not a lot of people could read, you know, we don't have, like, mass literacy, and certainly no mass literature, right. Um, LIAM: Right. JUSTIN: and it's hampered by the difficulty producing lots of newspapers, lots of printing... lots of paper, even. Um, and it's all controlled by the government, of course. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: God damn government. Hate those guys. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: Those pieces of shit, yeah. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Mmhm. JUSTIN: The fucking government. Anyway. So, Now, Gutenberg, in... I forget the date--invents... NOVA: Uh... who care. JUSTIN: ...Who cares... he's a--yeah, he's a... NOVA: ..."In olden time... invents..." JUSTIN: In olden time, he invents the printing press, right. Oh my God, I gotta log out of Steam. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: Oooh, I keep forgetting to do this! Alright. Okay. NOVA: Gonna hit you with the "newsman" drop. JUSTIN: Mmhm. [Clip from "The Newsroom"] Will: "You're a fucking newsman! Don, I ever tell you otherwise, you punch me in the face!" JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: I love that. I just remembered that the show, The Newsroom, existed, right before we started recording, I was like, I have to get... the bit where he just like, screams incoherently over a Coldplay song, LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: about being a goddamn newsman. JUSTIN: That's the only Aaron Sorkin show I've actually watched the whole way through. [laughs] NOVA: Really? JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: ...West Wing is, um... LIAM: Fine, it's fine... NOVA: ...it's a better show??? It's... LIAM: It's fine. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] The West Wing is a better show, and is, I think, essential to understanding why liberals got this way. JUSTIN: I've never watched any of The West Wing. NOVA: Mm. Well, it's, it's-- JUSTIN: Not a single second. Maybe I should go do that. NOVA: Yeah-- Well... LIAM: ...Studio 60 is pretty good, Studio 60 is pretty good. That only lasted a season. NOVA: For reasons related to being very good. JUSTIN: Mm. LIAM: Yeah. Well, NBC, uh... kills and eats everything good. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...Good things are not allowed. Alright. So, Gutenberg invents this thing called a printing press, right, and the innovation here is, A. you know, you just, you just press down... on the paper, and it creates print, hence "the printing press", right. B.-- NOVA: Yep. You have a bunch of little blocks, with a raised letter on them, JUSTIN: Yeah. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: you literally--that's where we invent, like, all of the stuff that you think about in terms of typing, like upper and lower cases, because you keep the capitals in a case above the thing... JUSTIN: Yes. The... you have movable type, so you just insert the letters, to make the words, you press it on the paper, boom, you're done, right, as opposed to having to NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: copy everything by hand, and making some bullshit, I don't know, Illuminated manuscript, um... NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: Right. NOVA: ...Just engraving, again, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. So... NOVA: 's for chumps. You don't wanna do it. JUSTIN: Yeah, so each... each individual letter, that's called a "sort", right, and they're stored, as [Nova] mentioned, in cases; the uppercase is where you have the big letters, the lowercase is where you have the little letters, right. NOVA: Oh, you actually put that in, I'm sorry, I... JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: ...I jumped ahead of you there. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: That's why there's a picture of the case here. NOVA: Aaah! JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Dammit, [Nova]. NOVA: Would probably help if I read the notes, as we were doing this... [laughs] LIAM: That will do it, will never do it(?) JUSTIN: I sent them to you early! Oh my God! LIAM: Never read the notes, never read the notes! [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, yea--and instead of reading them, LIAM: Never read the notes, baby! NOVA: instead of, instead of reading the notes, what I did was I got this. [Clip from "The Newsroom"] Will: "You're a fucking newsman! Don, I ever tell you otherwise, you punch me in the face!" JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] LIAM: Goddammit. [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. So, the printing press lets you print a lot of, uh... you know, words, real quickly, uh, if you were a skilled operator, you get 3,600 pages a day out of this thing, right. NOVA: Oooh. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: That’s a lot of Bibles. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, lots of Bibles–well, I mean, it’s like a couple Bibles a day. Which is a lot more than most people could do, NOVA: Ah, I guess so. JUSTIN: back in the day. You know, I couldn’t–I cannot even produce one Bible a day, handwriting. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I could probably barely get through Genesis, um… NOVA: [laughs] Yeah, we need–we need a standardized measurement of–like horsepower, of how many monks… JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: per, like… [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: How many monk per hour? Yeah. NOVA: Yeah… [laughs] [laughter] NOVA: ‘s like, “Oh, this is–this is a kill-a-monk, uh, like, LIAM: Spoilers, that conversion rate is not good. NOVA: “printing press.” NOVA: Yeah... [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. so, uh, as such, once we’re able to produce a lot more of the written word very quickly, um, people started getting the idea, maybe we can print... the news. Right. NOVA: God Damn News. JUSTIN: The God Damn News, yes. so, rather than, you know, since– so, you start seeing in Venice, right, this is in, mm... 1500s? 1600s or so, something called The Gazette being produced, right. So... “Gazette” is like a government newspaper–again, produced by the God Damn Government, right. [laughter] NOVA: Always sticking their fucking noses in! LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly, right? So, the God Damn Government produced an official newspaper called... it was not initially called a “gazette” but it costed one gazette, which is a small Venetian coin, right. NOVA: Oh, so it’s like–a dime novel, or like... JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Okay. JUSTIN: Yes, so then, uh, you know, the fir–Oh, okay, I wrote down the date, the first one’s published in 1556, right, and, yeah, government bullshit, um, there’s some non-government newspapers, they started to begin appearing in New York in the 1600s, and these have like weird, irregular schedules, right, you know, sometimes they would say they were weekly, but then they would publish extra editions, or they would not publish at all, or, you know, something like that, you know, sorta like our podcast. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: Um... NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, you just gotta– at some point, you invent the idea of yelling, “Extra, extra!”, and then, from there, the News happens. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: Yes. NOVA: I’m just looking, I’m just looking at the, like, sample you have here, that’s also a shitty headline. JUSTIN: Oh. “In Congress, July 4th, 1776”? LIAM: “A Declaration by the Reprefentatives of the United States of America, NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: “General Congrefs Affemble.” NOVA and LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: Dogshit headline, doesn’t tell me anything about what’s going on, JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: other than there’s a Congress happening. JUSTIN: I do– NOVA: “Congrefs”. JUSTIN: –Yeah, but it has this nice drop cap, right... I’m a big fan of drop caps. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] JUSTIN: I like drop caps a lot, um... so– LIAM: The price is only 2 coppers! NOVA: Yeah! “Publifhed every Tuefday, Thurfday, and Saturday evenings.” LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: [lisping] by reading this, I can actually give myself a lisp. JUSTIN: No, that was a thing back when you had the long s, is like, no one could figure out if you had a lisp or not. NOVA and LIAM: [giggles] JUSTIN: It’s... it was much more inclusive society back then. Anyway. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: –Yeah, it’s like, do you have a lisp? or do you not know how to read properly? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: I don’t know. [laughs] LIAM: Sometimes it’s both! JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: So, this is uh, still a labor-intensive process even with the printing press, right. Circulation was still restricted for most newspapers and, you know, “newsletters”--whatever you call them, right. Again, 3,600 pages a day per printing press per guy. Um... NOVA: Mm. NOVA: There also usually like, one sheet, like, you get, uh, maybe a one-sided sheet of paper, JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: uh, or like, it’ll maybe go onto the other side, but like, you don’t have, like, bound– or like folded newspapers, for a while. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. And then... And some people still, like, say, “let’s try and make a daily newspaper, we can probably do this; “this is the modern era, “it’s like, 1650, we can do whatever we want,” right. Um, so there’s... LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: There were a couple, uh, daily newspapers, uh, produced in the 1600s; one of the first serious attempt was in Leipzig, it was called... [off pronunciation] “Einkommende Zeitung”... right? NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Oh boy. NOVA: [proper pronunciation] “Zeitung”, it means “times”. JUSTIN: “Zeitung”, ah. NOVA: Yeah–”Einkommende Zeitung”, I– I don’t actually know what “Einkommende” means, which is... JUSTIN: I think it– NOVA: “Oncoming”? “Oncoming News”? JUSTIN: I think it’s “Oncoming News”, is what–yeah, I think that’s what it translates to. LIAM: –Just getting domed with a Leipzig paper. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: A guy’s just screaming, “Oncoming!” [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Someone threw out, like–the newsboy throws the newspaper, like, wrapped around a brick, through your window... [laughter] NOVA: It literally does mean “incoming news”! LIAM: (?) NOVA: It literally means that, so yeah, we can only assume that this was delivered by mortar, into your house, through the roof. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] LIAM: That’s–That’s effective. NOVA: Yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: So, that was the first serious attempt at a daily newspaper, that was in 1650. Now, 1783, was when this Pennsylvania Evening Post... became like, uh– the first daily newspaper in America; you see, this is... uh, 1776, July 6th, 1776, you know. Little bit after Independence Day, which was just a regular day back then. Um, publishing the, uh, Declaration of Independence. Um, but in the... 1783, this became a daily newspaper. And then, within a year, they ceased publication ‘cause they couldn’t keep up. [laughs] NOVA: Ah. It’s a tale as old as time, and like, same as it ever was. D’y think there was a guy who was like, had been working in the newspaper for like, a year, and was like, “Ah, “the death of print media.” JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] NOVA: “People are just gonna get dumber now.” LIAM: “You’re a goddamn newfman!” JUSTIN: A “newfman”... [laughter] NOVA: A god damn newfman... JUSTIN: So– NOVA: I think, I think we have to title this video “The God Damn Newfs”. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] LIAM: We love you, Newfoundland. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: We do. [laughter] JUSTIN: So... NOVA: (?), yeah. JUSTIN: –The problem here is that, you know, the time is not right, the technology wasn’t there, the manual wooden Gutenberg press... just didn’t have the capacity to publish a daily newspaper, right. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: So... NOVA: Yeah. You could do pamphlets, like– It’s not like–dudes in the 18th century would absolutely do like a small run, of self-published pamphlets that are just like, “Ah, my– “my sixth letter against the,” like, LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: “charges laid against me by Captain B., who I will not name, “but has accused me of being,” like uh, “a common whoremonger” and stuff–and that was posting, uh, for the longest time. JUSTIN: –That was posting. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: –That was the first Golden Age of Posting, before Twitter. [laughter] NOVA: ...Thomas Paine, big accounts, but like, and–the most famous one, and did a lot of pamphlets, but like, no, just anybody could do it, and you could just be like, “yeah, my neighbor, my fucking neighbor’s a huge piece of shit. “I’m gonna print this up, in like, maybe a run of 50 pamphlets and just hand these out.” LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Thomas Paine is only fam– Thomas Paine was a good poster because he had good opinions. You know. NOVA: ...It’s true. JUSTIN: –This is like, the main... the main reason he’s remembered as a fantastic poster; there were so many posters out there, which has terrible opinions. NOVA: [laughs] The–yeah, the Federalist Papers, the first Twitter thread. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly– NOVA: You already used that joke in, uh... NOVA: ...Franklin, huh. JUSTIN: Yes, I did. NOVA: Fuck. LIAM: Yeah, he did. NOVA: This is the problem, because– when I listen to, when I watch your other content, I’m just like, ah, that’s a good joke, I should use it on my podcast, with this guy, who doesn't have any relation to this, this content that I'm listening to, right now... [laughter] LIAM: (?), original joke, do not steal, original joke, do not steal. JUSTIN: Yes, alright. NOVA: Like, I had another joke about the Federalist Papers, but now I’m not– like, I have... false memory thing, where I’m just like, ah, did you make this one too, and I'm just stealing it and being a piece of shit again? Of just like, opening the Federalist Papers and it like, opens with... “Alright, listen up, y'all,” and then, “(1)”. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh my God. No–I didn’t make that joke explicitly; it sounds about right though. I mean... NOVA: Fuck! JUSTIN: [stammers] NOVA: –Someone can go back and check and they can yell at me in the comments, to see how much I’m stealing from you. JUSTIN: –Alexander Hamilton was a bad person. Um, anyway. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Thomas Paine was like the only good Founding Father. And it's dubious if you can even– LIAM: John Adams wasn’t that bad. JUSTIN: Aight–John Adams wasn’t that bad, yeah, it’s true. NOVA: Ah, it was mostly Abigail’s fault, like, she was definitely the better half of that couple. LIAM: Ooh yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: I kinda like Franklin. Franklin’s cool. JUSTIN: Franklin was pretty cool. I mean, he did own slaves, which was bad, but he also, like, stopped owning slaves, which is good. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: –We gotta give– NOVA: ...Fucked a lot of GILFs. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: [groans] JUSTIN: We gotta give some room for character development here. [laughter] JUSTIN: So– NOVA: ...He invented a kind of organ, he invented the lightning rod, and he invented the GILF. Uh, and for those– JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Yeah, for those we must be eternally grateful. LIAM: And unfortunately the University of Pennsylvania (?) wipes out all of the good things about him. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yes. ...There’s a bench at the University of Pennsylvania you can go sit on and it has like, a, statue of like, Ben Franklin just sitting there. LIAM: [groans] JUSTIN: With like, his arm out, so you can pretend you’re buds with Ben Franklin. NOVA: That sounds cool, I’d like to– JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: I’d like to pretend–I’d like to get a parasocial relationship, with Ben Franklin. LIAM: ...Well, get in line, you and every other Penn kid. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: Alright, so, in the early 1800s, they come up with some, uh, incredible new technology called the steam press. Alright... I got a YouTube video here. NOVA: [Nova noise] JUSTIN: Let’s see how this works–The rotary steam press would let you print huge quantities of newspaper quickly. Go. NOVA: ...’s a deadly-looking machine, like–this thing looks like it killed 5 orphans a day. LIAM: Oh yeah. LIAM: It probably did. NOVA: Like, just that belt going around, just totally unprotected for that whole long length, is like, [Nova noise], ‘s making my teeth itch. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: [Liam noise] JUSTIN: Well. So– NOVA: Yeah see–it killed the camera guy, right there. JUSTIN: Shit–okay, so, ...the way she cooches is, um... –we have no relation to AVE, um... Come on, I can’t–let me, let me... draw on this, fuck, I can’t do it, okay. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: So... JUSTIN: We have– NOVA: Another casualty, it claims another victim. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...We have this, um... So we have, like, pre-cut sheets of paper up on top, um, the drum brings ‘em down, you saw the, uh, what we have on the bottom here is a... conventional, like, press-sorta thing, right, you know, which is type set up backwards, uh, movable type as usual, and that moves forward and backwards as the, um, paper comes down, as the paper comes down, it moves forward, impresses the... type onto the paper, and as it comes back, it’s reinked for the next sheet, right, and this is all... driven by steam, right. So, you see these big belts, right here it’s being driven by an electric motor, right, but in reality, it would be, uh, driven by something called a line shaft, right. And... NOVA: That also sounds like it mangles some children. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. [laughter] JUSTIN: So... ...your line shaft–oh crap–okay, there we go. –Your line shaft system is where you have... You don’t have electricity yet, so what you do is you have a big stationary steam engine, like this one, in the... in the corner of the shop, right, and I’m sure this is like, a huge contraption that makes 5 and a half horsepower, and, um... NOVA: [snorts] JUSTIN: [laughs] You know. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: ...Well, like 7 if you put the little GTi sticker on there. JUSTIN: Yeah exactly, all you gotta do. LIAM: Yaay! Yaay! [laughs] JUSTIN: You just gotta... you gotta change the governor right here, right. LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: And then that... that has a belt, the belt goes up to a series of line shafts... that’s this thing up here, right, and then, um, and then you have belts that go down from the line shaft to the machinery, right. NOVA: Oh fuck me, that’s like– it’s a drivetrain with no gearbox. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: It’s just a long, spinning... metal rod with a bunch of belts connected to it under tension. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: [Nova concerned noises] Okay, so if one of those belt snaps and goes whipping across... the shop floor, head level, um... you kinda get [parody] [REDACTED] [in Minecraft], right? JUSTIN: ...I think most of these belts had a little bit of slack in them, you can see, ‘cause they’re like, twisting and stuff here. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: ...I think you can get away with a little bit of slack, I mean, there were... a million other ways it could kill you, though. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: Like, if you just put your hand in the wrong place, like, suddenly, you know, I don’t know, you got–taken up into the machinery, and then like, whipped around, like, 75 times, you know? ...You get turned into pasta sauce, um. [Minecraft “oof”] LIAM: Not a good way to go, Jesus Christ. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly, right, so. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: But yeah, the line shaft system was how we drove machinery before we had electric motors, right. Um, and this steam press, of course, it allows for... you know, basically daily newspapers to exist, because you could produce a huge amount of newspapers very quickly, right. NOVA: Hm. JUSTIN: So it’s stuff like, The Guardian, 1821, The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is the subject of today’s episode, that was 1829, we got the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin, 1841, New York Daily Tribut–Tribune, it’s 1841 as well, The Economist– NOVA: Did you call it “the New York Daily Tribute”? JUSTIN: “Triboot”? Yeah. LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: The Economist, that was 1843, Chicago Tribune, 1847, LIAM: [groans] JUSTIN: New York Times, 1851, of course, founded because NOVA: Boo! JUSTIN: a lot of rich people were really mad that the Daily Tribune was, uh, publishing so many... editorials from Karl Marx, um... JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] NOVA: –I mean–again, same as it ever was, like. [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Oh man. JUSTIN: But this still– NOVA: –At least The Guardian–like, The Guardian was still, um, was still cool at this point, and like, one thing I noticed that all this have in common, is that The Guardian’s in Manchester, The Times in London, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago... You need that industrial base, nobody’s like, publishing a newspaper in Duluth; it’s so closely tied to, uh, like– LIAM: Oh yes, Duluth, well-known for not being industrial. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: –I’m talking about in 18-fucking... like, 21. JUSTIN: –They haven’t put in the ore boats yet, yeah. LIAM: Yeah, they didn’t get there until 1869. JUSTIN: No one can like, conceive of like, an Edmund Fitzgerald, you know. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: But yeah, so, but– –This was a big development that allowed for... wide circulation of daily newspapers... But you still require like, that time-consuming manual typesetting, right... You can now print–you could print everyday, but you were still spending a lot of that day with a whole bunch of guys, in like a room, with a bunch of cases of type, you know, trying to find an extra “e”, ‘cause they ran out. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: “...Can we go down to the forge, can we get ‘nother couple ‘e’s? “We ran out.” NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: That's fine, just turn some shit on its side, they’ll never notice. NOVA: Yeah–I love to read the Philadelphia Inquirwr. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: So... The next invention which made publishing the news easier was called the Linotype machine. NOVA: Mm. I know the word “linotype” from like, fonts and stuff. JUSTIN: Oh yeah–I mean, that’s like– I think the company’s still around, but they just make money on fonts; they can’t make money on their machines anymore which is a shame because I... believe this is probably the pinnacle, of... mechanical engineering. Um, I don’t think anyone’s built, more complex and convoluted machine than this, uh, which was practical, ever. ...I don’t think it’ll ever be done again, either. NOVA and LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: It looks like a fucking, like, typewriter piano. It’s incredible. JUSTIN: Alright, so there’s... What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna link in the description, a video; it’s 30 to 40 minutes long if I recall, that actually pro– NOVA: Yeah, so go and watch all of it. LIAM: Yes JUSTIN: –Actually properly explains how this machine works, ‘cause I can never do it justice. Um, but, in 1866, we developed something called hot metal typography, right. And the first machine that makes this possible is the Linotype machine; Linotype is... you know, short for “line of type”, because that’s what– NOVA: Ah–We make fun of like, startup naming conventions today. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Really... Really effective abbreviations there. JUSTIN: ...Yeah. ...because that’s what it does–shit, I did the wrong thing–alright, so. How does it work? Uh, okay, so, down here, we had a keyboard, right. and... when you type a letter on the keyboard, no Shift key on here, you have like–uppercase and lowercase are separate– when you type on the keyboard, you release, up here, what’s called a matrix, right. That’s these various things stacked up up here. Now, a matrix is the reverse of a “sort”, right, a “sort” being, you know, the individual piece of movable type. ...Your matrix is this right here, you can see, it’s like an “A”, it’s upside down, right. NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: In this case, I think it has 2 settings. You have a regular A and an italic A. Depending on what key you press. Alright, so, this goes down into the chute, right, and it goes into what’s called the assembling elevator. Sometimes just called the “assembler”. I think more commonly just called the assembler; and then you have a, you have a guide at the end, that tells you how long the line is. Right. So... you type one line of text... All those matrices go down, they fall on the assembling elevator, then you say you’re done with the line, the assembling elevator brings it up, right. And then there’s a thing that shoves the type forward, and this is where the hot molten lead comes in, right. NOVA: [laughs] Okay? LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: Just took a, took a turn that I was not expecting. JUSTIN: Yes. It’s called “hot metal typography”, because it requires hot metal, right. NOVA: Mmhm. JUSTIN: So there’s a– NOVA: ...And what better metal to use... LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...Than lead, it has a low melting point, yes, that means it’s less dangerous. [laughter] LIAM: Don’t let your kids lick that, don’t let your kids lick that. JUSTIN: It’s operated by adults who know not to eat the molten lead. NOVA: Mostly. JUSTIN: Mostly, yes. LIAM: Mostly. JUSTIN: So, this is shoved over here, where the various matrices that formed a full line of text, are forced... ...grabbed and forced together, right, into a... sort of a solid mass and then, high pressure... molten lead is cast against them. and then there’s a rotating doohickey in here, so it can cool 4 lines of text simultaneously, before it shoves out the completed line of text, which goes right here, right, and those are– NOVA: Oh fuck, I get how this works now. Okay. You’re literally–you’re casting your type, JUSTIN: Exactly. NOVA: At like, line by line. JUSTIN: Now, there’s another thing in here, I forgot to mention before, there’s a special thing with the space block, right, so... when you’re making these lines of text, they all need to be the same size, right? So, the only way they can do that is through justification, right– You increase or decrease the amount of space... between the words, right, so, when you hit the space bar, it doesn’t drop down a matrix, right, there’s a wedge that gets shoved in, right. And then, when... when you finish the line, those wedges are jammed up as much as they can go, to ensure that everything spread apart evenly. It’s mechanical justification. NOVA: Ha–That’s so smart! Fuck! JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs] NOVA: ...I see why this is like, the apotheosis of mechanical engineering... you’re like... you’re manufacturing, like, instead of hunting around for an extra “e”, or whatever, you just type in the line, and, you have the casts in place for it to make, out of hot lead, an entire line’s worth, that you then imprint onto the paper. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: That’s so smart! Fuck! JUSTIN: Once the matrices have been used, they’re raised up, I believe through here. Right, they’re shoved over, and then like a big arm brings ‘em up, and it brings ‘em up to the top, right–Now you see right here, on the matrix, there is this... there’s like this keyed, sort of thing, right. That’s so it goes on a rail, and it’s pushed along by a worm gear, right, and they’re all keyed so they drop into specific places. Right, and they’re ready for you to be used again. NOVA: Wow. LIAM: That’s genius. NOVA: That’s incredible. [laughs] LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: So, these... cast lines of type are called slugs, here’s one down here, right, and, um, this is an incredible piece of machinery–they were first built in 1866, of course, at that time, they would’ve also been driven by, you know, overhead... shafts and belts, right, and you would have probably a hot steam line to melt the lead, NOVA: [laughs] Just incredible working conditions. [laughter] JUSTIN: So, but–they were built for a long time– this picture right here, is a model built in 1965. LIAM: Damn. JUSTIN: And this was–this is in the Deutsche Museum, in Munich. NOVA: Huh. Well, I mean... if it works, why change, right? JUSTIN: Exactly, right. There’s also... one of the problems with this, of course, is there’s no backspeece–backspace key, on the Linotype– NOVA: “Backspeece”. JUSTIN: “Backspeece”, yes. LIAM: "Backspeece"... [laughs] JUSTIN: There’s no backspace key on a Linotype machine, right. So, you know, you could go and take the matrices out manually, if you wanted to–if you screwed up a line, but more often, what... operators would do, is they would just, you know, finish the line by typing the first... letters they could. ...Which was usually: “etaoinshrdlu”, right. You know, right down here. But sometimes they forget to discard the line of type, so, you see down here, an example, “On Local Bowling Alleys, “This was an excellent showing, LIAM: [giggles] JUSTIN: “and [mumbles], NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: “etaoin shrdlu,” and then–Yeah. [laughs] So this is something that was just fairly common in Linotype newspapers, is like, they just forget, and no one would catch it in like... ...proofing the newspaper, right. But um... So, the Linotype machine was incredible because you could suddenly have one guy you know, all he had to do is type in the article, right... and you would suddenly– you know, rather than having a whole bunch of guys individually placing in movable type, you can have one guy do a whole shitload in one evening, right. LIAM: Right. JUSTIN: And this just reduce labor cost... ...this incredibly complex and stupid machine, NOVA: ...full of molten leads and steam pipes... [laughs] JUSTIN: Full of molten lead! JUSTIN: That was still cheaper than, like– LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is still cheaper than doing manual movable type. LIAM: Goddamn. NOVA: Yeah, just having a bunch of guys play fucking Scrabble with individual letters. JUSTIN: Yeah. [laughs]. So... But... this meant it was easier to start a high-circulation newspaper, right? Um, you replace them with some Linotype operators and usually there’s gonna be a machinist there in the... Linotype shop, to just, you know, machine replacement parts as needed. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah, I mean–I don’t wanna think about one of these, like, presumably, what? Hundreds, thousands of individual, like, matrix keys, if one of those doesn’t go back on... LIAM: Something going wrong, yeah. Fuck. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: ...that’s a fun repair, yeah. JUSTIN: It’s just goes in the wrong spot, and the whole... the whole shop just explodes in a– NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: a gigantic, like, wave of molten lead... LIAM: ...Molten lead, right, yeah. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...There were a couple safety devices in here, ‘cause if you did... ...if a line was the wrong length, right, and you shoved it in the wrong way, it would just squirt a jet of molten lead out. LIAM: Oh fuck. NOVA: Hm. JUSTIN: Yeah, so you wanna avoid that. So. In the sort of Linotype era, in the early era, we could... start doing more newspapers, ‘cause more people had... You know, it was easier to have a... widely circulated newspaper, so like, The Boston Globe, that’s 1872, Washington Post, 1877, Wall Street Journal, that’s 1889, you know... NOVA: (?) JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: New money showing up. JUSTIN: [laughs] And this means, since you have reduced labor costs, and you can... typeset the newspaper more quickly, that means you have... an extended deadline, right. You can get news in later in the day, right, you can add more news to the newspaper, you can print a bigger newspaper, right. ...Making a newspaper is still an incredibly labor and capital-intensive, but, it’s a little bit easier than it was before, and you can... more easily create a larger and fleshed-out product as opposed to, you know, a sheet of paper with some news on it, right. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: And since there’s cheaper printing and layout, it means you can have more newspapers to fill niches, right, and this is, this is when we start to see... especially African-American newspapers, uh, you know. ...This picture is actually from the Linotype shop of the Chicago Defender, right. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: ...This was a black-owned newspaper, oriented towards black people, published in Chicago from 1905 onwards, right. This is also... Copies of this newspaper were surreptitiously and often illegally distributed throughout... the South. NOVA: Hell yeah. LIAM: That’s awesome. JUSTIN: ...Through a network of Pullman porters. NOVA: (?) That’s awesome. JUSTIN: Yeah. So... ...So there’s a lot of... black-owned newspapers... were formed in this era, you know, because... ...there’s sort of a, baseline level of racism in, you know, every newspaper in America, right. LIAM: Oh yeah. NOVA: Oh... [laughs] yeah. ...an entirely distant phenomenon... [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly, right. LIAM: Oh my God, we live in a post-racial society. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: ...This was before it was acceptable to not be racist in polite society. NOVA: [laughs] ...A lot of white people thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to be, but, you know... “...what are the boys at the office gonna think?” LIAM: “...Everybody else is doing it”, yeah. JUSTIN: Exactly, it’s like... ...I can not be racist in private, at home, but I can’t do it in public. [laughter] NOVA: This is also what you get like, a bunch of like... foreign-language papers, right, like, New York, you get a bunch of like, Yiddish-language newspapers. LIAM: Oh, yeah, absolutely. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. NOVA: Or a bunch of German-language newspapers, or... like French, or Italian, or whatever. JUSTIN: You have to have a custom Linotype machine for that, too, you know, that’d be the other thing. NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: Oh yeah. JUSTIN: Like, a lot of times, there’d be like, special Linotypes machines on the floor for different fonts, you know. ...That’s one of the reasons why... ...you say “font foundry”, um, as opposed to, like... ...Fonts were like, you know... ...This is not just, you know, the shape of letters, you know, on a computer file, this was like, an actual set of pieces of metal that they’ve sent you. NOVA: Yeah... In lead. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: So fonts used to be a much deadlier proposition. JUSTIN: Certainly, once you had Linotype machines, they send you the matrices; they wouldn’t send you, you know... ...the leads... types, yeah. NOVA: Ah, I see. Yeah yeah. JUSTIN: So– NOVA: Beginning to understand, though, why... it took so long for Russia to get Russian-language newspapers... and it was like, oh yeah, ‘cause you have to do an entirely, uh, an entirely separate alphabet, let alone font. Cool. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. So, so... one of the first... African-American newspapers of this time was, uh, our own boys, The Philadelphia Tribune, um, that was 1884, right. But, obviously– And obviously, you don’t go out and just buy a Linotype at this point, right. These are still incredibly expensive machines, um, incredibly complex machines that require a lot of technical knowhow to run. Um, but scaling up production, once you had enough money to have a consistent, you know, market share, is much, much cheaper, thanks to the Linotype machine. NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: Um, and this lead to, you know, the sorta rise of... the large, daily newspaper, and... ...Here is a cross-section that was published in the Washington Evening Star in 1922. NOVA: Ah, the Evening Tar. JUSTIN: The Evening Tar, yeah– LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: –Go Heels. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: ...”The Evening Tar... 11th and Pennsylva”. JUSTIN: Yes. LIAM: “Pennsylvɐ”. JUSTIN: This building’s still... Still there, actually, um, right here. NOVA: Huh. JUSTIN: ...You can see–The Evening Star is dead. ...they also added this weird, postmodern addition to it, which I don’t like. LIAM: [disgusted noise] JUSTIN: Yeah. So, but anyway, you can see like, this is... ...you know... journalism at the time was... ...it’s sorta, you know, journalism, writing, you know, literary, blah blah blah, but it’s also like, heavy industry as well. Um, NOVA: Hmm. JUSTIN: So you can see, like, you go down from the 9th floor down, you know, we got a cafeteria on the 9th floor, that’s very nice, you get like, a nice view, um... You know, you have a, you have a stock ticker, that’s probably a, uh, one of those teletype machines, right. LIAM: God, I love those. JUSTIN: Then we have, right here, this whole room is Linotype machines. Um... NOVA: Hell yeah. and all of these stuff is co-located too, You don’t get the thing that a modern newspaper has where, the printing just happens off-site somewhere. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. You have proofreaders over here, to make sure that the Linotype guys didn’t screw up, you have a club room... ...I don’t know if everyone’s allowed in here, I hope they were. Um... NOVA: [laughs] No, this is... LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: ...this is where, like, four guys smoke cigars, and they’re like, “Yeah, we should start a war with Cuba.” JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: “Remember the Maine!” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: You got your editor-in-chief here, you got your associate editor, you got a lobby, you got editorial writers... Over here you have a library, right, ‘cause you don’t have the internet yet, you have to go consult the newspaper's library NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: to find information, or you can go down to the public library–of course you can also do that– but you would try and consult the one in the building first. They have an interview room. Wow. You have the... city room, for like, local news... There’s all these other editors over here, they got a whole room for sports illustrations, wow. They got the cartoon– NOVA: I mean, literally, like–how do you do illustrations, like, how do you get this one published, a guy has to like ink all of those, and then... ...Fuck, how do you even transfer that to printer? JUSTIN: I have no idea about that part... maybe someone can sound off in the comments, I don’t know how you did that in the 20s. You got like, the cartoonist over here, um, you got the photo department, you have the Sunday department– they just don’t show up most days– NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: They got a really good union. JUSTIN: Mm. Now, they rented out a bunch of the space in here as like, offices of the Consolidated Press Association, Washington Board of Trade, blah blah blah; as you go further down, you get more... Better Business Bureau, that’s in quotes though... You know they're sceptical of you. NOVA: Just... sarcastically, like, the “Better” Business Bureau. JUSTIN: Yeah–we go down here, we see like, the printing rooms, right. ...Some of this is underground. You can see... the circulation department here. There’s um... ...the printing presses for... you know, just these gigantic pieces of kit right here, and... those go up to the circulation department where they sorta assemble the newspaper, then it goes down a chute, and then loaded into trucks, right. And down at the bottom, they got, like, paper storage, they got all this industrial equipment, they got a boiler room because it’s all steam-powered... NOVA: Oh, of course. JUSTIN: Yeah. ...And then they got... dynamos and shit, like. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Nice. [laughs] JUSTIN: ...You got a nice lobby, they had a nice lobby down here, right, which is very, very nice, open to the public, where people can go in and submit classified ads, which is the bread-and-butter of any newspaper. Was. [laughs] LIAM: As opposed to “unclassified ads”. JUSTIN: Mmhm. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Classified ads where they... tell you to meet at a location on 9th Street, uh, bring a pistol, you’re gonna need it. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: [laughs] NOVA: ...I do like how many... how much, like, spying of the period was just, like, classified ads and shit like that... JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: That appeals to me immensely. LIAM: Uh, I think I can say this: My mother actually, uh, was– did not–this was many years ago, (?) did wanna say this, uh, my mom once answered a classified ad that turned out to be CIA recruitment. NOVA: Huh. LIAM: And showed up, at, uh, the CIA... headquarters, in beautiful Langley, Virginia, uh, for her interview, and was just scared shitless–but yeah, the CIA used to just, you know, “Hey guys, “wanna come do some imperialism?” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh yeah, come down to the building that we call a “highway department” building but everyone knows it’s not. LIAM: "Secret government shenanigans next left". NOVA: Yeah. You gotta... you gotta start a podcast if you want to do that shit now. JUSTIN: [laughs] My dad’s uh, yearly company picnic was always on, uh, there’s a park, across the street from the CIA building. That’s where it was. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: “Very secret building; do not look!” JUSTIN: Yea–very, very secret, do not look! Yeah. ...You can just see it. Like, everyone knows it’s the CIA, they claim it wasn’t; it was, it’s the CIA. They can go look at it, like, it’s just there. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...We know for a fact it’s not a highway department building, it’s the CIA. It says, like, “CIA” on it. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: You’re not– NOVA: ...It says “CIA” on the off-ramp. JUSTIN: [laughs] It does! –No it doesn’t, that’s the NSA. The NSA has the– NOVA: Oh, fuck, yeah, you’re right. JUSTIN: Yeah, the NSA has the label off-ramp. LIAM: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Like, literally, it’s just “secret government shenanigans next right”. JUSTIN: Yes. So, anyway, this is one of the smaller newspapers... ‘cause Washington D.C. was not a large place in 1922. And I think they moved out of here at some point, because they needed a larger printing area, right. And... they also moved out of there ‘cause they were kinda on a decline... Evening Star’s out of business now, um. NOVA: Ah, the decline of print media. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Typical. I will be saying this about every single era that we encounter. JUSTIN: [laughs] If you have, like, a big newspaper like The Philadelphia Inquirer–here’s the building right here, um, this is built in the early 1900s, right, LIAM: Woo! JUSTIN: so you’d have... You have on-site printing, if you have a big paper with lots of circulation that meant you needed a big printing building, so the offices of the newspaper were in this tower here, and the rest of this was devoted exclusively to printing the newspaper, right. LIAM: Good lord. NOVA: Wow. Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. And, you know, you had these, uh... If you’re running a big city paper, you needed to be very close to... um, well, in this case, Center City, otherwise I would say “downtown”, um, which... meant that, you know, ...you’re looking at–but you also need a huge quantity of paper, right, so you essentially need rail delivery, and this is why the Reading Railroad city branch was built, that goes right through here, mostly underground... well... in this part underground. ...And they would just, you know, drop off, like, 6 or 7 box car loads of newsprint every day, so they could print the newspaper, ‘cause you couldn’t bring trucks in; there’s just so much you needed, right. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: ...They kept that up until the 1980s, NOVA: Wow JUSTIN: until, you know, eventually they were like, “Yep... “yeah, we’re gonna... “...we’re gonna move the printing somewhere else, because we’re lame and boring.” NOVA: ...Because... we’re too boring to run a massive freight train full of paper and ink through the middle of the city, anymore. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: Sucks! JUSTIN: I mean, the right of way was there, the right of way is still there, You could still run a freight train there, yeah. NOVA: Fuckin’--reopen that shit! Immediately! ...That’s our campaign–after “burn down all the police precincts”, and after, “fund all of the... bail funds and the reconstruction funds”, is... “reopen... newsprint delivery by rail into Center City”. JUSTIN: ...But that’s complex, though, because the Inquirer has since moved... moved out of this building, they’re now somewhere over here–we’ll talk about that later– and, um, this building was vacant for couple decades, I believe. They’re now renovating it into the new police headquarters. NOVA: [groans] JUSTIN: Yeaah. LIAM: Yeah. JUSTIN: If you burn down the police headquarters– LIAM: ...the nice building at 46th and Market wasn’t good enough for them. JUSTIN: That was so dumb. NOVA: ...What you’re telling me is that the new police station of a police department that has just been on video brutalizing people, has an open but largely unknown railroad going directly underneath and into it? JUSTIN: Oh yeah–well, it’s not– NOVA: Have you read “V for Vendetta”!? JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: ...Something deeply makes me kind of laugh, although darkly, is that the Inquirer won a Pulitzer in the 70s for its reporting on police brutality, I believe under Mayor Rizzo–whose statue is now hopefully in hell– and now the cops are gonna move into that building... NOVA: Yaay! LIAM: ...because nothing–We can’t have anything nice. JUSTIN: Can’t have anything nice, yeah–well, they were gonna move it to West Philly– LIAM: At least it’s not condos. JUSTIN: ...and then they fully renovated that building for the police move into, they decided they didn’t want to... LIAM: ...Millions of dollars to do it, too! JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: ...Millions of dollars to do it! NOVA: I would love to have the privilege to, like, be as choosy a tenant as the cops seem to get to be. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Just like... I go to my landlord, and I’m like, “yeah, no, I’m not really feeling it, you know, “maybe if you do some more improvements...” JUSTIN: ...They didn’t wanna take, uh, the L, to work, I believe is the thing. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...They didn’t wanna potentially have to take the L– NOVA: Yeah, God forbid that you have to like, be around people! LIAM: There’s a goddamn–There’s a goddamn Lambo in their parking lot every fucking day. Take the goddamn L. There is a Lamborghini Urus. ...There’s a yellow Lamborghini Urus... in the Philly Police Department’s parking lot, you can see it with your own two eyes, NOVA: Once again... LIAM: and if that’s– LIAM: you know, dismantle the police, if for no other reason than I don’t have Lambo and they do. NOVA: ...Once again reminded of the fact that American police sees more in civil asset forfeiture than Americans lose in burglary every year, by a wide margin. LIAM: Yep. Yyyeep. JUSTIN: Yes. So. This was... The reason why you need a huge printing building right there in the center downtown, all these like, uh, all these like, infrastructure to support it, is just because you couldn’t like, electronically transmit the paper somewhere else to be printed, like in Lancaster County or somewhere like that, right. The printing had to be, absolutely had to be co-located with the rest of the journalism operations, right. NOVA: Mm. JUSTIN: So, as we move into the 20th century, latter half, we see improvements in printing technology, one of which is something called offset printing, right. So... Rather than hot metal typesetting, you can now do things... ...in such a way that– I don’t know what the interim method was; I know there was one, but at some point, you could do a lot of stuff electronically, and you could sorta print onto a big metal plate, which you could then use to print a shitload of newspapers at once; you can see, this is a big offset printer, and the newsprint is going so fast, it’s a blur, right. NOVA: Yeah, like... that’s where you get the, like, montage, of the... spinning newspaper, is... JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: [laughs] Which actually you don’t want in this; if newspapers are spinning directly at you in there, something has gone, uh, badly wrong. JUSTIN: If you put your finger in the wrong place here, you get a real nasty papercut. LIAM: ...You’re losing a whole bunch of stuff. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, you get a papercut that takes off your whole arm! [laughter] LIAM: It’s called “efficiency”, thank you! NOVA: You’re just like, opening up the paper, and being like, “Huh, “says here on the paper, ‘blood’.” JUSTIN: [laughs] Nah, it’s like a real nice clean cut, there’s no blood whatsoever. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: The paper’s gone so fast, it cauterizes the wound. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] Oh no. JUSTIN: You don’t even notice that your arm is gone until you go to like, smoke a cigarette or something. [laughter] JUSTIN: “Ah, (?) another one (?)” NOVA: ...They call it “printer’s arm”. JUSTIN: So, ...You can now do, like, newspaper layout without, you know, hot metal typesetting. Newspaper production, again, becomes cheaper, becomes less labor-intensive, right. deadlines can be extended again– NOVA: Yeah, ‘cause you have to pay out fewer people for like, jets-of-molten-lead-to-the-face-related injuries. JUSTIN: Yeah. You can also, like, you can print more news this way, because the deadline is longer. ...Decisions happen later in the night, ...printing happens later in the morning. LIAM: ...Oh boy. LIAM: Feels like foreshadowing. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: You know, you can just cram more news in, you can print more news... Like overall, you’ve... And you’re still, like, charging money for physical newspaper, right. LIAM: Right. NOVA: And journalists, which like “journalist” by this point is, like, an actual profession, with like... good pay, and things of that nature, mostly, and so... ...they’re quite pleased... like, longer deadline, ‘cause they can, like, do day drinking longer. JUSTIN: This is true, yes, the other thing is, like, I don’t think you actually... laid off a lot of, um, folks who did... the actual production of the newspaper through this process. Circulation was still going up and up and up and up... NOVA: Like... infamously, in Britain, even after they moved everything offsite to Docklands, printers famously were very well-organized. ...I mean... they did bust that eventually, thanks to Rupert Murdoch, billionaire/Australian tyrant, but... ...right up until... right through the ‘80s, I remember... ...Docklands print workers were, like, thoroughly unionized, so it was very difficult to fire people. JUSTIN: Yeah. I mean, you know... ...you need a lot of, you know, ...these are–these were good union jobs– NOVA: Yeah, it’s– JUSTIN: ...They still are good union jobs to an extent... And, um, you know, running heavy machinery, you know, it’s a good way to get a union job, if you can get into it. But. You know. So we get into, like, the 1990s, right. Um... Which is sorta the... peak of print journalism. NOVA: It was so good that you could print joke newspapers. LIAM: Yep, you could print The Onion! JUSTIN: I used to pick up The Onion in print like, every week when I was in high school. It came out on Friday, it was wonderful. You just had a print edition of The Onion, The AV Club was in the back, it’s great. This is actually– NOVA: Yeah... but it didn’t have the comment section, so... JUSTIN: Oh God. LIAM: So it was better. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: It was better. [laughs] JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: “Zodiac who?” LIAM: Comment sections were a mistake. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Go to Something Awful. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: So, in the 1990s, you know, local newspapers, they’re just gigantic behemoths, right. Um... some of them are printing up, like, they’re putting out multiple editions of the newspaper each day. Right, sometimes there’s multiple editions for different geographic regions, sometimes there’s newspapers in different languages, they got all these kinda stuff, right, you know, they had massive, massive labor-intensive huge departments with lots of people devoted to like, specific subjects, you know, especially local reporting, right. Your local newspaper’s gonna tell you all about what your councilperson is doing, like, all this kinda crap, generally speaking. LIAM: The horrible shit that cops are doing... JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Mmhm. LIAM: Like... That’s why we have Pulitzers for local reporting, that’s how– NOVA: Yeah... you, like, pay a guy enough to sit through every fucking city council meeting, and eventually some news pulls out, because in, like, item 27 of the city budget, is just like, Iunno, like the hush fund for like, corrupt cops or something. LIAM: Yes. And that’s, you know... The Boston Globe, winning its... Pulitzer for... whatever their special newsteam, basically. NOVA: Yeah, Spotlight. LIAM: Having... the ability to fund shit like that. Now... I remember, kind of as an aside, back when old, old... not even Gawker... old Deadspin, ...they had a special, you know, reporting unit, and now that’s dead, because of, as we’ll get into, private equity money, and... media consolidation. So, like, your local newspaper, ...especially in a place like Philly, probably won a couple Pulitzers, and is instrumental in kinda... keeping people accountable, for what that means in 2020, I suppose. NOVA: Yeah, and you had jobs that were not precarious, so like, "local journalist" was a career track that you could do. And you could, like, develop the skills to... and the contact! that you need in journalism, to be able to write about, like, a city’s politics, or, ...a town’s politics much more effectively than if you were just like, some guy who’s just out of journalism school who’s gonna get fired or laid off the next year. LIAM: Right. Or even, you know, extending it just to sports coverage, you know... One of the things– Like, reading ESPN suck. NOVA: Mm. LIAM: And one of the things that, you know, local journalism is really good for, although it might not seem as meaningful, is local sports coverage, because, you know, a team... ...and, you know... there are arguments against that, like access and favoritism, but, if you got a guy who’s been with the team for you know, 25, 30 years, ...you might get a more honest look as opposed to just ESPN running 4 stories, all featuring, like, LaVar Ball or some shit. NOVA: Yeah, like, I would much rather, like, read a well-crafted piece of sports writing, than a listicle about, like, oh, it's like the top 20 draft picks, or whatever, it's like, who gives a shit. LIAM: Yeah, and again, going back to even in a place like... ...York, Pennsylvania, we actually have two newspapers still, which is goofy as all hell, but they're able to provide coverage in a mid-sized city that may not get the attention that it normally would, and one of the reasons they can do that... and those newspapers are actually–so, a bit of an aside here, York, Pennsylvania had a white supremacist for a mayor, JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: his name was Charlie Robertson– I mean, this is York, so, y'know, comes with the territory– but he murdered a black woman–allegedly murdered, a black woman named Lillie Belle Allen in the 60s, during the race riots in York. When he was a cop. And the reason that that story... and he was actually tried much later, I remember reading about it as a kid, one of the reasons he was tried, one of the reasons he was, y'know, even they got to that point, was because the York newspapers never let the shit go. It didn't just get buried somewhere, they never let the shit go, and, you know, he was acquitted, but I think, y'know, if York didn't have those newspapers, we just had our fucking Fox affiliate, that shit would never have happened. NOVA: Yeah, absolutely. You need a local newspaper. If for no other reason than, if it doesn't irritate the shit out of the mayor, and the chief of police, and whoever else, it's also gonna have, like, a fucking weird-ass name. And that's the important thing, to me, is, like, I want to be able to read, like, a The Name of Town, uh, Mercury Picayune, or something. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: There's also–shit, uh... Stephen Reed, who is absolutely one of the funniest–because Harrisburg is hell, and I cannot say this enough, but one of the reasons–Stephen Reid ended up getting charged with, like, 500 counts of theft, fraud, and corruption after his 20... [sub note: *28] years as mayor, and one of the reasons was, again, local news just kept their foot on it. NOVA: Do not underestimate the might of the Local Times Post intelligence(?). LIAM: Yes. JUSTIN: Oh yeah. LIAM: All three of those together. Gotta be all three of those together. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: Like, obviously, y'know, these institutions, like, ...these papers with, like, um, y'know, there are problems with, like, access journalism, even back then. ...And still today. But, y'know... Having a well-funded local newspaper is probably better than not having that. And one of the reasons why these newspapers were so well-funded, is because of advertising. Right, as well as being able to sell a physical paper. Right? So... one of the things about advertising in a physical newspaper, as opposed to advertising online, is that the costs make more sense. Right? So, let's say I take out a full-page ad. Um, y'know, this is the whole newspaper, I take out a full-page ad. I'm expected to pay for the cost of printing that page, and the cost of adding an extra page to the newspaper. Right? Plus a fee. Plus extra if I want the ad in color. Right? And if I have a circulation of a couple million, like if I'm a big newspaper, that's a chunk of change! So, y'know, even when I worked at, again, our rinky-dink student newspaper, The Triangle, at Drexel, even back when print journalism was on the decline, this is like 20... JUSTIN: 2014, 15. LIAM: 13, 14, yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, something like that You were paying $1,100 for a full-page ad. [laughs] In our rinky-dink paper, right? And then you had classifieds, too, classifieds were charged per letter. And that was even better than a full-page commercial ad. NOVA: You only need three: “C”, “I”, and “A”. JUSTIN: Yes. [laughs] And newspapers had a monopoly on classified ads for a while, y'know, and... per column inch, those made a lot of money– Column inch is like you have one column in the newspaper, and then there's like one... one... inch. Right, that's a column inch. Um, and they made a shitload of money doing this, just between commercial advertising, uh, y'know, classifieds, Donald Trump taking out editorials as advertisements, NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: saying that the Central Park Five should be, I don't know, hung, drawn, and quartered. JUSTIN: “Hanged”, excuse me. NOVA: Yeah. Not all good. JUSTIN: Yeah, not all good, but y'know, brings in money for the newspaper, whatever. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, y'know, these newspapers, especially in the 90s, they were printing money almost as fast as they were printing newspapers. NOVA: Well, yeah, cause you've got the machines right there, you just like... JUSTIN: Yeah. And, y'know, advertising... you were making so much money off of advertising that it was relatively practical to put out a free newspaper, right? So, y'know, there were, like, commuter papers, I remember, which was really good. The Washington Post Express, I used to pick up every day. You had, like, alternative weeklies, the City Paper... stuff like that. NOVA: Yeah, which, again, land of contrasts. You get, like, The Stranger in Seattle, which launches the career of Dan Savage and also does a bunch of TERF shit, like, relatedly. Or, you can get, like, a good alternative weekly. It's entirely variable. JUSTIN: And then you had The Onion print edition, um, pictured here. This is the last issue, December 12th, 2013. Volume 49, issue 50. Which was very, very sad. I have a copy of this somewhere back at home. Cause I was very unhappy, I mean it was like, The Onion's going away, oh god. I mean, obviously it's still around, it's just online, but there's something nice about being able to pick up The Onion outside of King Street Metro, y'know? NOVA: Yeah. This is, like, this tracks so neatly to, like, a movie plot. This is the bit where the, like, the drug kingpin is like, we were making so much money, we didn't know what to do with it. And you just have a montage of guys putting, like, stacks of cash into oil barrels and stuff. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. LIAM: [laughs] LIAM: Losing, whatever, 10 million a year to just rats eating it. NOVA: Yeah. Yeah yeah. JUSTIN: Well, the Fed does that all the time. NOVA: [laughs] Alright. Liam put in a slide. I yield my time. LIAM: Oh, is it my slide? Is it my slide? JUSTIN: Yeah, you put in Nixon. LIAM: Oh, I did put in Nixon. JUSTIN: You want me to put the notes on screen for you? LIAM: Oh, I... No, I'm good. NOVA: Oh wait, there's a Nixon slide? I don't have the Nixon slide. LIAM: There's a Nixon slide! Yeah–oh... Okay, well, yeah, don't–put up the Nixon slide–Hang on. Alright, yeah, so here's Nixon. Great. So I kinda wanted to talk about– y’know, especially with the decline of print journalism, (?) the consolidation of media. Um, the fact that, like, these institutions can be, like, A, are powerful, and B, can be used for good. Like, the fact that the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers–I don't know if we want to get into the whole history of that, but basically, Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study that became known as the Pentagon Papers, by 1969 realized that the war was essentially unwinnable, and released portions of the papers to the New York Times, who published them front-page, detailing the Johnson administration's massive expansion of the war, how poorly it had been going, as well as Nixon's incursion into Cambodia. NOVA: As a yardstick for, like, the freedom of the press, and the assertiveness of the press, compare that to the treatment that Chelsea Manning got, or Reality Winner got, or John Kiriakou got. LIAM: Exactly, and that's kind of what I wanted to illustrate, like, do you fucking think the New York Times and Washington Post would run the Pentagon Papers today? NOVA: No. Fuck no. JUSTIN: No. LIAM: ...And they ran the excerpts of– JUSTIN: ...No one ran the Panama Papers! [laughs] LIAM: No, they didn’t give a fuck. NOVA: Yeah. NOVA: ...they were in The Guardian for a little bit, and you could, like, search the database and then nothing happened. And I think everybody involved knew that nothing would happen, and so nobody was that stressed about it, apart from that one Maltese journalist who got mysteriously killed with a car bomb right after. Um, but like, yeah, no, it's... this is the problem, right. ...Everybody glorifies Woodward and Bernstein, for good reason, but like, you can trace the effects and the decline of print media in the careers of Bob Woodward and Robert* Bernstein, because like, [sub note: *Carl Bernstein] what they're up to now? Like, I think it's Woodward who has the Inside the Trump White House book, but for like, years and years he was fully on board with the Iraq War, and with the Bush administration, and it just... it felt like you wanted to be like, are you the same guy who did the... [stammers] ...what happened, man? LIAM: Yeah, I mean, this is Woodward– ...it's such a damn shame, because Woodward... went on CNN and defended the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq, which of course there weren't, and like, that's one of the things that I also kinda wanted to loop into, is like, I don't... like, not the fake news, you know, freedomeagle dot 1hillarycriminal dot ckeg dot us shit, NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: but one of the things is like, you should, as we've said on this podcast numerous times, be skeptical of big institutions. Why would the New York Times run an op-ed by Tom Cotton– and they can hide behind the sort of insane bullshit of, y'know, both sides-ism, ...and that sort of thing– ...Like, if you think media, especially now, doesn't have bias, it doesn't have an agenda, you need to read more, essentially, and you need to learn more, and you need to understand that, like, Jeff fucking Bezos has a vested interest in keeping things away from you. NOVA: “Democracy dies in darkness.” I mean, like– JUSTIN: ...like, one or two times they produce an article that's... critical of Jeff Bezos, y'know, like, for all the casual journalism, they're like, “yeah, Jeff Bezos, he's a pretty great guy.” NOVA: Yeah, I mean... Have you seen the videos that people have put together of, this is TV rather than print, but, uh, all of the Sinclair-affiliated... LIAM: Yep, Deadspin put that out. Oh my God. JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Well, like... ...they will have a package that they'll just ship to affiliates, pre-scripted, and then they'll run it, and so you can put all of these side-by-side, and you can have, like, 50 different anchors all saying in absolute unison, “this is a threat to our democracy,” it rules. NOVA: ...There's been an absolute, like, withering away of the... if there ever was independence of the press, there's been like a tightening of that leash that capital has around it. JUSTIN: Yes LIAM: Yes. LIAM: And that's one of the things, is like, when, you know, Deadspin got bought out by whatever the PE firm was, uh, Great Hill Partners or some shit, ...Deadspin was writing stories and doing things that nobody else was fucking doing. And nobody else would write. And that's one of the things, is like... ...it's important to understand the value, I think, of people who do exist sort of outside, you know, this, like, ...especially right-wing grifter space, so to speak, as we all get cancelled. Um. JUSTIN: The griftocracy. LIAM: Yeah– NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: ...it's important to look at sources and news outside of that. LIAM: And like– NOVA: Well, like, there's a reason why Peter Thiel had to destroy Gawker, right? And it's not just because, oh, they outed him, and it's like, I'm not gonna sit here and defend everything that Gawker did, or the attitude with which they went into that, where they went into a Florida courtroom, and, like, this smug dipshit was like, they put the, like, associate editor of Gawker on the stand, and one of Peter Thiel–indirectly– one of Hulk Hogan's lawyers, asked, you know, if you had a sex tape, would you run it if it was newsworthy? And he said, yeah, and the next question was, how young would the people in that sex tape have to be before you would not run it, and the guy, like–jokingly, he did an irony, he did a bit–he was like, iunno, like, 11? JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: And, yeah, this went over exactly as well as you would expect, and now the Gawker doesn't exist anymore. Um. So. I dunno. It's... any kind of, like, even that land of contrasts-ass outlet, provided too much of a threat to be allowed to continue to publish. JUSTIN: I was gonna say, [Nova], the way you said “Gawker” sounds like “Sebastian Gorka”. NOVA: Yeah, Sebastian Gawker. LIAM: “Gawker”, yeah, I– JUSTIN: “Greetings, Mr. Chapo!” [laughter] NOVA: “Hop on down to the White House.” “Tell me, Mr. Chapo, would you consider a surface-level series of tattoos to be indicative of an allegiance?” JUSTIN: Oh, God. LIAM: Terrific. JUSTIN: Alright, alright... LIAM: Yeah... we are the podcast-to-fascist pipeline. Sorry everybody. JUSTIN: Unfortunately it's happened now. LIAM: Sorry guys. JUSTIN: So, alright. So all these newspapers are making a shitload of money, then what happens? NOVA: ...I have a soundbite for this, as you transition into the next thing. It's, uh, yeah. No, the fuckin'... [sounds of dial-up modem connecting to the internet] NOVA: Just drink that in. JUSTIN: Yes. It's nostalgia. NOVA: ...I feel like we should've had this slide come in line by line. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: Just loads, like, very slowly, you get the, like, dead image thumbnail a couple of times. JUSTIN: You've got mail. [clip of AOL’s “You've got mail”]. JUSTIN: Thank you. LIAM: Thank you. [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. So, JUSTIN: this thing happens called Internet, right? Internet happens. NOVA: People start going on the computer. JUSTIN: They start going on the computer. One of the greatest– NOVA: Second great era of posting. LIAM: Ruining Usenet. And they ruined the Usenet. [laughter] JUSTIN: So, yeah,so, after the 90s, like, y'know, I think we all know what sorta happened, y'know, ...more and more people are getting their news online rather than in print, y'know, newspapers start putting articles up online, right? And the online, of course, had the potential to revolutionize reporting, news could get to more people than ever before, right This could reduce overhead for newspapers again, they could probably, y'know, invest that money into better reporting, they could overall improve everything for everyone, right? ...This was a revolutionary moment. NOVA: Yeah... Let me just– JUSTIN: ...Anything could have happened. NOVA: ...Let me just check whether that happened, I've gotta, like, log into my AOL account and– [clip of AOL’s “You've got mail”]. NOVA: Yeah, no, they didn't do that. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: No. NOVA: [laughs] Ooh, line goes down! JUSTIN: Let's talk about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: Which I think has been, um, more and more, y'know, proven. NOVA: It's being recognized more and more. ...People are talking about it more and more, and there are many such cases,and we're looking into this very strongly... that there's a tendency. JUSTIN: Look, I've spoken to a lot of economists and they say it's bullshit. But, y'know, one of those economists is not the Economist magazine. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So yeah. One of the problems with online news is that the advertising does not bring in anywhere close to the amount of revenue that print advertising did, just because print advertising was based on something concrete, and online advertising is, y'know, I don't know, based on, like, fairy dust and, y'know, some garbage. NOVA: Also, it's an effect of other monopolies, which is quite funny, like, to see print media, which has been incredibly monopolistic at times, being murdered at the hands of, like, all of your advertising money just goes into Google AdSense and, like, black box auctions for what keywords get put up. JUSTIN: Online advertising fees, right, they're not proportional at all to print advertising fees. I mean, y'know, okay, so, think about the cost of printing the newspaper, right. If I were to add another line to this, y'know, the cost of printing the newspaper eats up a significant amount of this advertising revenue, right. –And also it probably costs more to print the newspaper than the advertising revenue right now, which I'm sure is another problem– But this whole space right here, y'know, if we're gonna go ahead and integrate that, gives you a lot of room to have, like, really high quality reporting, ...y'know, you have a nice building, you have a big news team, you have all this kinda nice stuff, you have a lot of wiggle room there, you're running a business with a lot of fat, and you can use that fat to do quality reporting, you can do all this sort of shit, that now... you can't really do. NOVA: No. You can't even have your club room with the cigars on the top floor of the building so much. JUSTIN: Which, why would you have a newspaper if you can't do that? NOVA: Yeah, that's the entire point of this racket, is to be able to sit there with William Randolph Hearst, and just, like, pick out on a globe where you're gonna, like, intervene against next. JUSTIN: And even if your cost of, y'know, online is much lower than your cost of printing, the delta between your revenue and your costs is still so much lower than what print media got you. Right? NOVA: But also, like, we should say that, like, media as an industry, print media has been remarkably slow to adapt to the internet. Even still. Largely because it became so fatty and so ossified that, like, because you could have a whole career in journalism at one paper, you could then become the guy who makes these decisions and, like, be dealing with the advent of the internet, and just be a how-do-I-rotate-PDF guy. You could be like, “do I know what a JPEG is”. JUSTIN: I mean, there's that, but I suppose I shouldn't have said, like, fat, right, because a lot of this is not fat, this is muscle. [laughs] NOVA: Yeah. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: This is what makes the newspaper run. And this is the difference between being, y'know, I don't know, you can't run the same kind of operation with this much wiggle room as you can with this much wiggle room. Right, you can't have the one guy who works six months at a time on one story, and he breaks it and it sells a million newspapers. You can't really do that anymore when you have just this amount of space to work with. I mean, it's a totally different environment. And this is like, because of both print advertising, like, folks don't wanna do that anymore, they wanna do online, cause it's cheaper, it doesn't work as well– It works about the same, cause all advertising works the same amount, which is it doesn't work. Um. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: But print advertising doesn't work, but it's also cheaper–excuse me, online advertising doesn't work, but it's also cheaper. Y'know, you may be getting your message out to ten times as many people as you did when you were a print operation, but you're making ten times less income. Right? NOVA: And also, the advertising is much more annoying, and hinders the news experience much more, because you're trying to read the article, and like, a little .gif of a Toyota RAV4 fucking drives across your screen. JUSTIN: Yeah, or you have like an autoplay ad, or like there's a whole, like, LIAM: [groans] JUSTIN: ...there's an ad that takes up the whole screen, there's a reason for that, and that's because these operations can't... ...they're eking out as much revenue as they can, cause they know it's not enough to maintain the amount of reporting that they could do, like, ten years ago. I mean, this drop right here, that's like 2005 to like 2009, that's not just like... ...the economic recession; this is a catastrophe, if you run a print newspaper. This is–you had to lay off so many people, you had to contract your newsroom to the point where it's a shell of its former self. Like, there's nothing left. NOVA: With that blood in the water, you then get the, um, you attract the sharks of private equity, which is a business model that only starts existing and becoming profitable in, like, pretty much the 2000s. Where your business model is that you take over a company that has often a large amount of, like, sustainable assets, and a large amount of staff, and like a large pension fund often, and you strip all the copper wiring out of the walls, fire everybody, pay yourself a massive paycheck and bounce. Um, JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: and you can get very, very rich doing this. Like, you can make a billion dollars doing this. What you also can do doing this is kill a bunch of newspapers that people, y'know, maybe have sentimental attachments to, but more importantly, people may have, I dunno, pensions from, or healthcare from, or jobs at, and those no longer exist, because you needed to buy another yacht that you could go to Little Saint James Island on. JUSTIN: But it's okay, cause Mitt Romney said Black Lives Matter, so, um. NOVA: Yeah. Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. My example here is like– LIAM: I was like, that was a mindfuck. That was a mindfuck. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Just opening Twitter being like, how are the fucking Democrats getting flanked by Mitt Romney. Mitt fucking... NOVA: Mitt.... Mitt “throw those Molotovs, fam, I don't care,” Romney. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: I look forward to Willard's continued radicalization, LIAM: and expect him to just go, I don't know, full anarchist Black Cross. NOVA: It's gonna be him and Jeb, just in a couple of hoodies, they’re first over the fence at the White House. JUSTIN: Riding a Soviet tank into Washington. LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] LIAM: “Yeah, so you thought it was over at the Fulda Gap, didn't you?” NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So as... As you see this massive decline in revenue, just enormous, you start having to shed resources, right? And that's like, y'know, you're printing less newspapers, I guess that reduces some of your costs, but you're also like, your revenue's going down so quickly you get sloppy. You get rid of people like, willy nilly, you get rid of whole departments like local news or something like that. You get rid of your office space, you sell your building. That was one of the things that happened to the Inquirer in the... I don't know exactly when it happened, they sold their building to, I believe, Bart Blatstein. The worst person on Earth. Not the worst person on Earth, but really bad person. He's not quite Ori Feibush. He's at least more entertaining. LIAM: Don't be anti-Semitic. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh, right, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't criticize Ori Feibush or I'm anti-Semitic. Urban PHL said so. LIAM: I, however, can't–CAN criticize Ori Feibush.. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: Without being anti-Semitic. NOVA: It's like you have a diplomatic community. JUSTIN: Yeah. LIAM: Yeah, that was my favorite thing with someone being like, "you're anti-Semitic," and me being like, nope, nope, he's not, I'm right here. JUSTIN: It's because someone burned down one of Ori Feibush's condos, this was like four years ago now... LIAM: "Gentrification boxes", yeah. JUSTIN: And I posted in the Urban PHL Facebook group, which is like the local urbanist Facebook group, I posted a reply to the thread, which is just a photoshopped version of, um, you know that show Win Ben Stein's Money? NOVA: [laughs] Yes. LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah, I just photoshopped that into Win Ori Feibush's Money, cause he was offering a reward for information. And then, like, people dogpiled me and said I was anti-Semitic for doing this. I didn't even know Ori Feibush was Jewish. I also didn't know Ben Stein was Jewish. Um. [laughter] LIAM: Yeah, that’s probably... a bit of a giveaway, but no, NOVA: Total, total defense... LIAM: he really did–I can confirm that he really did not. LIAM: I was like, yeah, Ben Stein's Jewish, and Rocz was like, LIAM: “is he?” And I was like, yeah bud. Yeah bud. He is. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: ...I cannot overstate the extent to which ignorance is like a perfect defense to anti-Semitism. You're just like, “yeah, you were doing tropes about these two guys,” and you're just like, I was doing what about the what? What? JUSTIN: Who? What? No. LIAM: “A Jew?” JUSTIN: Yeah. So anyway– NOVA: Alright–start on page one. “What's Jews?” LIAM: Alright, I'll bite. What are Jews? NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: What are–We just don't know. [laughs] Alright, so, because you have so much less revenue to operate these newspapers, you're laying off people willy nilly, you're laying off whole departments, you might have to focus more on national news, just so people will still try to buy the newspaper, right, because if it's exclusively local news, they're not gonna find out 9/11 happened or something, right? NOVA: ...But also, that means that your national journalists are gonna be people, like, there's no more up-and-coming, it's entirely, like, the guys who have that access and are like, totally sclerotic now. JUSTIN: Oh yeah, I mean, there's no new talent coming in. And that's– NOVA: Oh, huge Bari Weiss erasure! [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] [groans] JUSTIN: And there's... JUSTIN: This problem is not just in reporting, it's also in the people who, like, put together the print edition, right? No one, like, I can't imagine right now trying to go in and trying to get a job in laying out print newspapers. You're like, yeah, I'm really fucking good at Adobe InDesign, pay me $75,000 a year. Like, no, you can't do that anymore. NOVA: [laughs] No, everybody's a freelancer now. And it sucks. Badly. But... JUSTIN: ..As a result– NOVA: On the plus side, at least every major newspaper is still completely unwilling to cut the, like, upper-middle-class-to-upper-class welfare program that is the op-ed section. JUSTIN: [groans] NOVA: And so you'll still get, like, oh, we had to pay this absolute shithead, this dumbass who comes up with the worst takes imaginable, yeah, we have to pay that guy, like, five million dollars a year. JUSTIN: Alright, we're back to Stu Bykofsky, yes. [laughter] NOVA: Well, like, this is international. It's not just like, oh, we paid... Tom Friedman to go to Mumbai and talk to a cab driver, allegedly. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: It's also, like, in the UK, it's like, all of these nice white feminists who went to all of the same universities, being like, writing the same five columns about how trans people are some existential threat. That's not making anybody a lot of money, but it's gotta go in every time, because it's pure [Žižek snort] ideology. JUSTIN: Yes. I used to run an op-ed section, I can tell you for a fact, it's all fiction. None of it's real. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: I wrote op-eds, none of it's real. It's all fake. People say they did things and it just didn't happen. There's... [laughter] JUSTIN: So, yeah. Anything you see in an op-ed page is fiction. ...So, as a result of this, lots of newspapers merge, or they fold entirely, especially alternative weeklies, free newspapers especially, and that includes a lot of stuff that reported exclusively on local issues, right? And since news is online, ...a lot of views, like traffic, is devoted to big newspapers that can attract a lot of people and they report on mostly national issues, right? So... NOVA: And those big papers will get bought out by, like, billionaires who can afford to have a loss leader in, like, The Times or the Washington Post, say. JUSTIN: Yeah, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post, yes. NOVA: Yeah. They can't lose enough money on that that it will make them, that it will outweigh the benefits of having their soapbox. And so, like, often you'll see, like, Murdoch had a bunch of free papers. Still might do, as far as I know. Just because it, like, by that point, not because they were making so much money that they could afford to, but that, like, money was fake at that point. It didn't mean anything. JUSTIN: Yes. It doesn't mean anything, yeah. NOVA: The collapse had been so total that you could just throw money into this pit of [Žižek snort] ideology, and just publish whatever you wanted. JUSTIN: Yeah. I mean, there's... it's just a completely different environment now. NOVA: It's funny, like, the... ...Lib idea, the dream of the printing press, the Gutenberg printing press, is that, like, "oh, just anybody can print whatever they want, nobody can stop them, and it's total freedom". And it turns out we did end up doing that, but just for, like, three guys. JUSTIN: Yeah. It turned out to not work that good. NOVA: Yeah. [laughs] Works fine for them, they can do whatever they want, so. JUSTIN: ...Brings us back around to our subject, so how does this all relate to publishing this fucking headline? LIAM and JUSTIN: [laugh] NOVA: God, I'd almost forgotten about it, in all of the confusion. LIAM: Almost. Almost. JUSTIN: So, you're, let's say, you're in the Inquirer layout department, right, and the Inquirer, I believe, is still a nominally print-first publication, that means whatever– the headline is determined by the layout guys, and that also goes up online. They did try and correct this a couple times online, they flailed around for a bit, yeah LIAM: Oh, they sure did. [laughs] JUSTIN: Cause it's gone through three headlines now. So, but, if you think about it, like, okay, who's writing this headline? You got a bunch of old heads in the layout department, y'know, they've been around for thirty years or something like that, and they're making all the decisions. They haven't changed their ways in that much time, y'know, cause there's no young people in the department– Will: "You're a fucking newsman! Don, I ever tell you otherwise, you punch me in the face!" NOVA: Those guys. Goddamn newsmen. JUSTIN: Yeah. Yeah, so, y'know, there's no young people going into the dynamic and exciting world of print layout. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: And it's hard to change a culture without new people coming in. This article's on page A12. No one gives a shit about A12. Like, the biggest shit they gave was they remembered to do the drop cap. NOVA: Which, of course, that makes a difference in a paper, online, though, where you can just put it on Twitter and be like, "is this headline actually 'Buildings Matter, Too'?" JUSTIN: [laughs] Yeah. Also, like, I just realized... ...this is a one sentence paragraph? There's one line underneath the drop cap. I assume they had to alter the size of this photo, like, intensely, to just get one line under the drop cap. Anyway. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: So, y'know, this is a department which is neglected, it's full of old people who hate everything. Y'know, this combination of carelessness, inertia, hollowed out shell of a layout department, and it was probably 3am in the morning when they put this thing together. LIAM: Fuck you. JUSTIN and NOVA: [laugh] JUSTIN: It's like, whoever did this probably didn't think it was a big deal, they were like, this is a punchy headline, this is gonna be great, everyone's gonna love us. And it turned out, no! LIAM: “People will talk about it”, and they sure did! JUSTIN: They sure did, yeah. NOVA: The scene in the layout department, after they punched that one in, just, uh... Will: "You're a fucking newsman! Don, I ever tell you otherwise, you punch me in the face!" JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: Goddammit. [laughs] NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: ...(?) know, this is a bad headline, this is a really bad headline, guys. Like, I... NOVA: [laughs] It sucks. It sucks shit, it's a god awful headline. JUSTIN: And so, all of the staff of the Inquirer who were black, the next day they did a sick out, the executive editor of the paper had to resign and– NOVA: A lot of that going around, like the New York Times lost James Bennet over the Tom Cotton editorial, there was another couple of resignations, yeah, it's been a big week for resigning in shame. JUSTIN: Yeah. And, like, this is... These are, y'know, our paper's a national laughingstock right now, because, like, someone published this shit. This fuckin' headline. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: And, I mean, y'know, it's very bad on its face– I feel like it's more of a symptom of a deeper institutional rot, which is just everywhere. And it just keeps getting worse. NOVA: It's like rising damp in the building, y'know? JUSTIN: Yes. “The sick building syndrome that affects all American institutions.” NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: Leaks? Is it leaks? JUSTIN: Yeah. And... I dunno, I feel like this is only gonna get worse. NOVA: Oh yeah. JUSTIN: ...Anecdotally. LIAM: Yeah, I think so. JUSTIN: I mean, I think there's positive things coming, and at least people saw consequences for this, thank God. But I mean, alright, so, anecdotally. My uncle works for the Roanoke Times. In Roanoke, Virginia. Which I assume all the East Coast elitists assume is like one... one shack next to the railroad line. No, it's like a– LIAM: Roanoke is nice. JUSTIN: It's a big city, yeah. It's like nice, there's a couple breweries, Virginia Museum of Transportation, you can go down there, you can see–used to be able to see 611, you can't anymore, because they've moved it to South Carolina, I think. You can go see some steam locomotives. Norfolk Southern just moved out, which is stupid as hell. They just shut down the engine shop, too. Again, stupid as hell. That's a lot of union jobs gone. Anyway! So, my uncle works for the Roanoke Times, and the company that owns the Roanoke Times, which is the most ethical company run by the most ethical capitalist, Berkshire Hathaway. NOVA: Oh, Warren Buffett! JUSTIN: Yeah! NOVA: I have a Warren Buffett drop from the Trashfuture episode we did about him, where he is like... [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] NOVA: American magic. [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] NOVA: Just an elderly, elderly man saying the words “American magic”. American magic. [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] NOVA: He rules. JUSTIN: When I went up to do a little thing with the Kingston Tenants Union, in Kingston, New York, they were gonna do a showing of my... Power, Planning, & Politics episode about gentrification. And the biggest landlord in that town is Warren Buffett's son, I believe. I don't remember if it's his son, or how he's... maybe his nephew or something. And he showed up. And watched the... LIAM and NOVA: [laugh] [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] JUSTIN: Power, Planning, and Politics episode about gentrification, with all the Mao jokes. That was funny as hell. [laughter] LIAM: That's facts, baby. JUSTIN: Yeah. Alright, so, anyway. So Berkshire Hathaway owns the Roanoke paper, where my uncle works, and he works in layout, you know, he goes out and he does the, he works in layout from like, second-ish, third-ish shift, you know, sometimes he doesn't come back for a long-ass time, you know, until the paper is done is when the shift ends. And their intention, as I understand it, is they're gonna move the layout operations of the Roanoke Times, as well as several other local newspapers they own, to Madison, Wisconsin. NOVA: Hell fucking yes. LIAM: ...Yeah, well-known for being near Roanoke, Virginia. NOVA: Yeah. No... absolutely no problems about this, whatsoever. LIAM: We will still get the same quality, for sure. NOVA: Yeah. You don't need to know how to spell any of the, like, street names, or anything. JUSTIN: ...you don't need to know any of the local culture, you don't need to know anything. I have to do... NOVA: No, just give it all to Jan Janssen. JUSTIN: And that's, y'know, that's from... Warren Buffett, ethical billionaire. Y'know, so. American magic. NOVA: American magic. [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] [BUFFETT: “American magic.”] JUSTIN: And, y'know, I guess this is where we are with journalism now. No one cares. No one gives a shit about anything. There's no way to make money doing it anymore. There's no way to, like, have enough money coming in to do journalism properly, and when you do, do it right, y'know, like if you’re... JUSTIN: ...you're doing, like, Deadspin or something... NOVA: They'll just kill you. JUSTIN: They'll just kill you, yeah. NOVA: And I mean, either figuratively, in court, or if you're... a Maltese journalist who looks too deeply into the Panama Papers, literally, um... I mean, this is the part where I get to talk about Tronc, which is my favorite part. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: So Tronc is–was... ...part of this consolidation resulted in a company called Tribune Publishing, and for a while, I think 2008 to maybe 2013, they rebranded all of their shit as Tronc. T-R-O-N-C, Tronc. All lowercase, I believe. And this, in theory, stood for Tribune Online Content. LIAM: Tronc! NOVA: Tronc, Tronc, yeah. And what Tronc did was, like, it was gonna try to, like, do the private equity model where you buy up the newsroom and, like, asset strip it, but instead of asset stripping it just for a personal payday, they were gonna try to, like, negotiate their way out of the end of print by pivoting everything to video. JUSTIN: Oh, God. NOVA: Yeah, so it meant that, like, you would collect your, like, newsroom full of crusty goddamn newsmen, and you'd be like, yeah, you're a Vine guy now. And this worked exactly as well as you could imagine. JUSTIN and LIAM: [laugh] NOVA: It's the same, like... Basically, it was like, if you consumed media at this time, between 2009 and 2013, you were aware of this, because all of a sudden, everything was acting like BuzzFeed, and, like, your newspaper would be, like, doing listicles, or be doing quick hits like that, and it was just an insanely weird time– It didn't work, a lot of papers went bankrupt. They were probably gonna do that anyway, but I think Tronc did them no favors. JUSTIN: Yeah. Oh, God. NOVA: Like, just give me the private equity guy instead who's just gonna, like, strip all of the copper wiring out of the walls, and like, carry off the fucking water cooler. JUSTIN: ...Tell everyone to stick to sports. NOVA: Yeah, give me that guy instead of, like, “Oh, we're gonna do TikToks. “Do you know how to do a Harlem Shake?” LIAM: No. No. No. No. Turn it off. JUSTIN: This is like... [clip from Big Bang Theory] [SHELDON: Bazinga.] JUSTIN: ...this is like Paul McJournalism, he's been working here for 60 years. Go make a TikTok. NOVA and JUSTIN: [laugh] LIAM: It's just a pacemaker sadly going in the background. JUSTIN: [laughs] Oh, God. NOVA: [laughs] Yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. So. NOVA: Yeah. JUSTIN: Well. Here we are. Um, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has... Y'know, done what it did. This is all what "disruption" is. That's what startups do. I mean– Uber has proved that the rate of profit can fall below zero, and capitalism can just keep going. LIAM: Doesn't matter, yep. NOVA: Yeah, the only way that you can now make media like this, now make written media, is either you are, like, an Instagram influencer who has a newsletter, JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: or you are enmeshed in the patronage web of some fucking latter-day bourgeoisie, or you're a tech company, and then you can value yourself at like 18 trillion dollars. You can also try putting up a paywall, and see where that gets you, that's the last gasp at the Alamo here, of print media, is like, oh, what if we make the words fade out, surely then people will pay money per month to read more about how transphobia is actually good. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: I have an Inquirer subscription. I mean, that's like, I will give it to them, I won't give it to anyone else. NOVA: Yeah LIAM: That’s fair. JUSTIN: But it’s... also like, euh... LIAM: (?), baby. JUSTIN: Yeah. Speaking of patronage webs... NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Feel free to subscribe to our Patreon for bonus episodes, our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. NOVA: Hell yeah. JUSTIN: Yeah. It's gonna happen. It's real. It's not a recurring joke. NOVA: No. JUSTIN: [laughs] LIAM: [laughs] JUSTIN: Oh, God. I feel like we've ended on a more depressing note than usual. NOVA: It's fine, it's fine. What I'll do is, Liam, if you have anything to plug, you do that now, I'll play us off with, like, I have a musical drop to play us off with. LIAM: Yeah, real quick, I just wanted to say, again, thank you for giving your money to people who could use it a lot more than we do right now, and please continue to do that, like I said, one of the things I'm gonna do this week is probably tally through... how much has actually been donated, I just wanted to say I'm very proud of the people who have donated, very proud of our listeners, the problematic, and actually, I wanted to say that Rocz has talked to Union Pete, and we know nothing. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Well, yeah, cause we were– we were both day drunk at the same time, we decided to regroup later, which we haven't done yet, I'll do that tomorrow. I guess. –No, I'm gonna edit the episode tomorrow, it'll be up on Wednesday, which, NOVA: At some point in the future... JUSTIN: Wednesday will be today for who's listening to this. NOVA: At some point in the future, we will have a shirt which you will be able to buy, if capitalism has not collapsed entirely. If it has, by then, we have a shirt that you will be able to get for free. LIAM: You could swing by our houses and maybe I'll stencil some shit on. NOVA: Yeah, absolutely. We all were like, what we need to do is we need to, like, liberate the Eagles t-shirt cannon. LIAM: Yeah, or the Sixers, they gotta have that in storage. I'll write an email and see if I can borrow it. NOVA: Yeah, and we'll just do some indirect fire shit, like the Einkommende Zeitung. JUSTIN: [laughs] NOVA: You will just, like, you'll buy the shirt, and then we'll just, like, indirect fire, we'll just, like, the shirt will come through your roof. JUSTIN: Yes. We will mortar your house with t-shirts. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: We will... depending on how far away you are, I mean, we have two bases of operations, Philadelphia and Glasgow. We have mortars, we have howitzers, we have regular large bore guns. NOVA and LIAM: [laugh] JUSTIN: If need be, we will invest in intercontinental ballistic t-shirt missiles. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Flying crowbar, baby! NOVA: That’s right. JUSTIN: Just tossing t-shirts out the back. NOVA: Alright well. NOVA: Yeah. I think that leads us to playing out, now that we've restored some optimism, a musical salute to print media. It was often dogshit, it's now dead. Kind of sad, but whatever. Bye everybody. JUSTIN: (?). ♪[“Astronomia” by Vicetone and Tony Igy]♪ JUSTIN: Yeah, I was like 50-50 on you either doing that, or, like, that last episode of The Newsroom where they did, “that's how I got to Memphis.” NOVA: Oh, fuck yeah, no, it's like Shenandoah, isn't it. JUSTIN: [laughs] JUSTIN: Yeah. NOVA: Oh, fuck–No, Shenandoah’s the one where the dude just fucking strokes out and falls and cracks his head. JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: And it's the funniest shit in the world, because it's just, like, it's not played... it's played completely straight, and then he's just like, “Ugh. [donk]” JUSTIN: Yes. NOVA: ♪Shenando–♪ yeah, no, rules. JUSTIN: Oh my God. Aaron Sorkin has a brain disease. Anyway. NOVA: [laughs] JUSTIN: Alright. It's the end of the podcast, we're done. It's over, I'm calling it. NOVA: [laughs] LIAM: Alright–Jesus. LIAM: Bye bye. NOVA: Yeah, go home. JUSTIN: Bye, everyone. Go home. It's over. Why are you still here? Go home. [laughter] NOVA: You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. JUSTIN: Yes.