“That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die”

We’ve all had this conversation a million times before. You know, the overly serious “How long does print have, doctor?” talk.

Yes, we get it. Print doesn’t have videos, links to related articles or any of that multimedia garbage that all the hipsters love so much these days. Also, you can’t make your newspaper magically display naked women like your computer can, so there’s another demerit. You have to buy a whole other publication for that kind of stuff.

The only way that print will best online in that department is if they put free pornographic pull-outs in every Sunday paper.

Until that glorious day, we’re stuck wondering if paper has any chance against free online content.

If you took a moment to contemplate that, I have a special message for you: You’re a moron.

Isn’t this what I talked about in my first post? Why are we back here with a different flavor of the same core idea?

Corporate journalism will die. That’s what you see as failing. Local will not.

Corporate journalism’s content can be found free anywhere. That’s why you think you can get news for nothing. Local does not give content for free, if it’s smart, and you can’t get that info anywhere else.

Corporate journalism is large, bulky and soulless. That’s why you think reporters are evil and manipulative. Local has heart, soul and purpose.

Print will continue to live. Its face of corporate journalism is melting away only to reveal the truth that is everlasting local news.

Any questions? If so, you weren’t reading. Go read a local paper and enjoy it.

I see the Web. Others see the spider.

When I was a kid, I played the hell out of Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. Those years of controller mashing did two things for me: 1). It taught me curse words my peers wouldn’t learn for years, and 2). It taught me never to fear technology.

Not everybody is as lucky as I am. There are those wracked with soul-gripping terror whenever faced with a new toy.

I think Eddie Izzard provides a great overview of the two sides in this clip, a bit lovingly (and haltingly) animated in plastic bricks by a fan.

Unfortunately many of us are forced to interact with technology in our daily lives, all in the name of our careers. This forces the timid among us into a socially-enforced implosion therapy.

And you know what? I think that’s OK.

Computers, the Web that connects them and the new devices that emulate them all are pushing us to a bold new society, a place and time that will require communication by Hermes, not by Marathon (and that’s my reference to ancient mythology for the day).

Businesses have already demonstrated the purpose and usefulness of the Internet. If employees aren’t ready to work with it, they force people like me to make those annoying and trite comments about them being “the wrenches in the gears.”

To make my position clear, I’ll note that I’m only interested in forcing people to invest time with technology in the name of work. I myself plan to throw away my cell phone and possibly my Internet connection when I retire.

So do it in the name of business.

Who knows what’s even going on anymore.

Every day I wonder what it really takes to be a journalist of tomorrow and whether or not I’ve got it. Sad thing is, I’m know I’d make a damn fine journalist of yesterday.

A story is never contained well enough in words alone. For a story on parking, you need plans for a new lot or a graph of impaction. For a story on city council meetings, you need an info box with summaries of issues or pictures of heated debate. For a story on an accident, you damn sure need pictures of blood and guts, or maybe just a picture of a dented car.

The World Wide Web complicates things. It’s not good enough to write a beautiful story and give it a simple package.  It needs clever Web design, properly made and overtly relevant videos, snappy slide shows and link upon link upon link connecting yet another trough of similar information. It spins my head every time I think I can do well enough just by being competent writer with some basic page design know-how.

I can’t even just work at a paper and leave it at that. No, no, no. I have to think about how it will look on the Web as soon as I start writing or it will just be shovelware. I guess that’s how it goes with techonology trends and that’s how you keep up with the audience. I just wish I didn’t need to master the five magics to have people read my story.

Maybe I should just stop writing stories. Given how much of a story people actually read these days, I might be better off making photo journals with one-sentence cutlines instead of doing any real investigation. Or maybe I should stop getting so down on myself, man up and keep doing what I do. Either way the world of journalism moves on.

Obligatory “I see dead Orwellian prophecies” headline

“OK, this is gonna sound totally crazy and shit, but follow me on this one: I seriously saw, like, something totally ripped out of this book called ’1986.’ So, like this Web site totally had this info up that, like, was totally wrong and stuff and then the next day, it was gone, man. The Man, man, he totally changed the shit ‘cuz he didn’t want nobody to know, man!”

We’ve all heard it before. “Google is Big Brother,” (note how almost all the results concern different issues) or “Facebook is the harbinger of Huxley’s prophecies.” At this point, making reference to literary Nostradamus’s has become trite and tired.

I’d like to beat that dead horse again, and for no discernible reason other than a petulant “this is the Internet and I’ll say what I want, so screw off.”

So let’s roll in to what I really want to say. I think that any Web site is a Minitrue for whoever owns it (and I say it in the parlance of Orwell’s novel. I’d also like to add that this aside is probably the most condescending thing I’ve ever written).

By that, I mean those who moderate a Web site have access to it’s entire compendium of knowledge and whatever will be added to it. I could create a site, cover it with predictions that Sylvester Stallone will be the next president. When he doesn’t win (which is a shame, because his foreign policy is really solid), I can just take everything down, create a few articles predicting the winner and some mock time stamps and BOOM. I control information. Unless you have photographic proof — which can be easily destroyed, I hope you know — my garbage predictions never existed and I can only be seen as the clairovoyant that I truly am.

Of course, none of this matters if nobody reads your site, and those sites with actual readership don’t pull these kind of hijinks (see this NY Times piece, “A disappointing decision”), so this really isn’t a threat. So here’s where I pull an Emerson and just say “I no longer agree with what I just said.” Hope you had fun following broken theory, because I know I did.

Maybe when we die, we all go to Google

Socrates once said that all philosophers should long for death. He reasoned that the body is actually a tomb for the soul and once the soul was freed of it, it began again the search for wisdom unfettered by the desire for pleasure.

If Socrates were alive today, he wouldn’t say that. He’d say that all philosophers longed for the Internet.

Let’s talk some Socratic jive here. Socrates, if I may put his tongue in my mouth, would say that the Internet already is one step ahead by means  of taking away the body. The computer strips away your flesh and only allows soul through to the servers, like St. Peter at the Gates of Heaven.

Once purified by the screen’s holy light and allowed to pass into the realms of FurCadia or wherever it is that your sick mind takes you, only your soul shines through. If you’re a furry, the World Wide Web is the only place for your disturbing soul to shine its awkwardly tiger-striped light (or not).

For all the deviants of the world, the World Wide Web is the place to live and the “meatspace” is the place where you go once in a while to make sure that you have enough money to buy a fursuit.

Now, Socrates would also have a field day with the ultimate search for truth that is Wikipedia, then he’d probably get stuck for years trying to define virtue with the idiots on 4chan. I’m choosing to ignore that now, having introduced all of his concepts that I needed, so you can dump him in a mall in San Dimas for all I care; we’re through with that dude.

The point I’m running toward should be pretty obvious by now, but for the slow, I’ll just say that a blatant answer is coming.

All communication happening on the Internet is nothing more than the transmission of souls. We speak to one another frankly and with our true opinion, without need of the body to represent nor constrict us. We are as we feel inside. We become our philosophies.

On the Internet, if your soul is some kind of freaky-deaky anthropomorphic tiger, then God damn it, that’s you.

Therefore, if it used to be that the soul is restrained by the body and it could only experience freedom in human death, and now we can separate soul from body by means of a monitor, tower and keyboard, then we can experience Socratic death every time we turn on a computer. Therefore we can experience the afterlife and possibly even true joy.

Basically, I think I was trying to say that the Internet is Heaven. Now that I really think about it, though, I think I’d rather say that every time you play WoW, you’re good as dead.

When there’s no more room in Hell, the Luddites will walk the earth.

The world will end in 2012. Let it be known that Anthony Joseph Siino the Venerable prophesied it first.

Not even Roland Emmerich could make a movie out of how it really goes down, though.

March 4, 2012: Skynet goes active. An artificial intelligence made as a quick-response defense system, it goes to work evaluating threats to America.

March 6, 2012: After reading www.tmz.com for 48 hours straight, Skynet decides that the greatest threat faced by any living thing ever is the World Wide Web. It instantly shuts down all Internet activity in America after making this decision.

March 7, 2012: Aside from some minor confusion over why the lines died, any country not called the United States of America, Britain, South Korea or Canada shrugs it’s metaphorical shoulders and picks up a phone to get the international news. In America, much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing ensues.

March 14, 2012: Realizing that the Internet is not coming back, the entire state of New York makes a pilgrimage to the Skynet supercomputer and makes it offerings of golden calf statues and frankincense. The state of California loses 64.6% of its population to mass suicide over 14 hours.

March 15, 2012: American businesses suddenly realize that they can still make interstate purchases if they pick up a catalog and make some calls. The surviving population of California is in the third stage of physical Facebook withdrawals: constant oral narration of daily activities.

March 17, 2012: American citizens return to barbaric ways of the past, including slavery, denying women rights and reading newspapers to discover the news.

March 19, 2012: After only two days of reading newspapers the average IQ skyrockets and American citizens, realizing what they’ve done, feel a little silly. They return all human rights and make sheepish apologies, mumbling something along the lines of “we kinda just got excited an’ all.”

March 25: The encyclopedia industry makes a stunning comeback, as do the music industry, the film industry, the video game industry and any other industry that distributes content that can be file-shared. Citizens suddenly seem educated in politics and are slowly relearning conventions of face-to-face conversation and basic motor skills. The sun  shines everywhere, even in winter, and every human being is now followed by a bluebird companion who perches on the shoulder and sings only the most joyous of songs.

April 2, 2013: Americans over the age of 65 catch wind that the Internet may be down. A collective sigh of relief sweeps across the Bible Belt, so large that it brings about the second Dust Bowl. Sales of “The Grapes of Wrath” increase tenfold, as do immigrants to California.

April 3, 2013: Native Californians, still bitter about the whole thing, frequently open up Firefox and stare wistfully into the darkness of the “no connection” screen while listening to “I will follow you into the dark.”

“Journalism cannot change” or “How I learned to stop worrying and keep doing my job.”

If you think journalism is going belly up, go die in a fire.

As a journalism major, many times I’ve had well-intentioned friends and family ask “don’t you worry about having a job in the future, with all these papers closing down and what-not?”

As a reasoning human being, many times I’ve quieted the urge to beat these people using my brass knuckles imprinted with the word “sense” in all caps.

“But Anthony!” you say. “This is a fair question, no?”

Sure. Papers ain’t looking so sharp lately. But you still earn a death glare from me for not thinking about what journalism is before you question its immortality.

Let’s evaluate journalism, shall we? Journalism, by the definition I like best from Merriam-Webster.com, is “writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation.”

Does that sound like something that will ever lose value?

Obviously, the answer is no. In America, we like to think we have freedom of choice. That choice extends to knowledge and interpretation as well. When writing gains a bias — a stilted interpretation lacking in all relevant truths —  it insults the (intelligent) reader.

Of course, there is always the question of where this journalism will be hosted. In that sense, I concede that the “aren’t you concerned about papers” question is valid.

But as I see it, papers aren’t what’s important. Journalism is what’s important. Keeping your dirty phallus-shaped biases away from my truth is what’s important. That sick business belongs on the Opinion page, Fox News or in the trash.

Journalism already seems to have refuges in the Web, as more papers create online editions or move entirely to the tubes of the Internet. Some are even learning how to encourage subscriptions without pissing the moochers off.

Things may seem bleak for the traditional houses of journalism, but once we reporters learn to act as the hermit crab and cast off one shell for another, we will live on, bringing down presidents and instigating wars with Spain as we always have.