TypePad Mocks Media Famine

Fatwah / November 19, 2008

By Yasha Levine

Six Apart, the company behind the popular TypePad blogging platform, just went Marie Antoinette on us all. With all the jobs being cut in the paper industry and increasing numbers of reporters stuck with nothing to do but moan, the company decided to help out. Introducing the “TypePad Journalist Bailout Program”: a free TypePad Pro blog account for every unemployed professional journalist! A media famine is afoot, journalists don’t have papers to work for. So…”Let them blog!” For free, of course. All of which helps Six Apart’s bottom line…

Here’s how they preface it:

Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We’re Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you.
We’re a company founded by bloggers, and we’ve supported online journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worrried [sic] about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we’ve put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence.

Right. Financial independence with a personal blog.

You almost have to respect Six Apart’s fuck-the-poor offer. After all, blogs are the reason why America’s journalists are out of the job. Why not try to help out the people you put out of work with a service that costs $10 a month. Not only will this gracious gesture surely be tax deductible, but it’s already getting the company tons of cheap PR, the kind you really can’t buy. Thanks for rubbing it in, assholes. And thanks for making money off our poverty. Don’t let ’em fuck you, folks. The really poor and destitude should do like The eXiled and go with WordPress, the free, open source alternative.

Read more: america, media famine, typepad, Yasha Levine, Fatwah

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14 Comments

Add your own

1. Tommy | November 19th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
WordPress? Real men write their own damn blogging software.
2. Sexy Kate | November 19th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Real men don’t leave stupid comments on news sites.
3. Patrick | November 19th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Real men love it when The Exiled posts images of those hot Russian babes.
4. Seryoga | November 19th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Real men carry barsetkas!
5. Tommy | November 19th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Sexy girls know a joke when they read one.
6. Wengler | November 19th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Real men and sexy girls both know that it was craigslist that killed newspaper journalism and not blogs.
The classified ads were the moneymakers.
7. Michael | November 20th, 2008 at 1:24 am
really real men write their blogs with nanoblogger.
8. John Smith | November 20th, 2008 at 4:10 am
3 days ago the NY Times ran an article about voiceofsandiego.org and other news sites funded by grants, with a little advertising and voluntary reader donation on the side. I’m not optimistic, but maybe it’ll work. And the BBC seems to have had fairly solid editorial independence, despite being entirely government funded, although I can’t see the US government starting up anything like that very soon.
Full-time professional investigative journalism is one of the few industries that I will mourn among the many killed by the internet.
9. marketfrankford | November 20th, 2008 at 7:03 am
BBC is not government funded per se. It was created by an government legislation, but it is funded through a license fee paid annually by everyone who owns a TV. Granted, the fee is mandatory, and I guess the body that enforces it is technically part of the state. But the proof is in the relationship between the BBC and Downing St: Thatcher hated the BBC and wanted to destroy it. And things got so bad between the Blair government and the BBC over the WMD thing in 2003 that there was actually a body count: http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/25/kelly.timeline/
[I mean a body count besides all the Iraqis and stuff.]
10. Scott Gunsaullus | November 20th, 2008 at 8:01 am
I thought Ames said they weren’t going to do comments. Anyway…
Like the auto industry, newspapers in America have choking on their own largesse, like fat man with clogged arteries and diabetes that suddenly realized he can no longer walk the 100ft from his front door to his car.
The nineties saw unprecedented mergers and consolidations. The conglomerates lobbied the SEC, FCC, and Congress for the approval to makes themselves even more fat and bloated. But like dinosaurs, the bigger these companies became, the harder it was for them to adapt to a changing environment.
At the turn of the century, when the internet first took off, they stuck their heads in the sand. Many were slow to adopt a significant online presence. Many of those that did go online early, tried to charge their online readers subscription fees. Traditional newspaper subscription fees and newstand prices are meant to cover the cost of distribution at the lowest common denominator that returns the highest possible circulation. The web offered newspapers the chance to increase their circulation with a relative zero increase on the cost of distribution and thus to increase their advertising revenue.
When craigslist and the realty websites started cutting into their classified revenue, they didn’t adjust their prices and services to compete. The disparity is amazing. If you want to list a home for sale or a job opportunity in a mid sized local paper, it will cost in the neighborhood of $500. That versus free. They didn’t get it. They buried their heads and just waited for the comet to impact.
It’s not surprising that the independently owned, 1 owner-1 paper, outlets (what few there are) are managing survival better than the Media Generals and Gannets.
11. Thomas_Nolle | November 21st, 2008 at 8:33 am
Since when are unemployed journalists a bad thing in the eXile’s opinion?
12. dino | November 23rd, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I’m having a moment of disbelief here. Hello Exiled readers. We read this site because the standard outlets are corrupt, crooked and on the take. There are no real journalists today except in BLOGS.
So who cares if the NY Times and the other outlets go bust. If I wanted bullshit propoganda I’ll tune into Bush’s next press conference. The sooner the world is rid of phony journalists the better and it seems the traditional outlets are funding these fools.
13. Jeff Albertson | November 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Second, Dino. The day the Washington Post does the dead parrot, I’m opening the glenlivit. Nothing but an huge waste of paper. I’ll miss Richard Cohen and Mark Trail about equally.
14. lani | May 20th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Real men don’t like Integer men