Repealing Obamacare is a nonstarter?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Repealing Obamacare is a nonstarter?

The industry has finally wakened to the seriousness of its predicament but continues to come up empty-handed vis-à-vis anything resembling a solution. And the almost universal response to the crisis--an orgy of downsizing that is destroying the worth of the product whose economic value it seeks to restore--demonstrates how ill equipped newspaper owners and publishers are to find a way to save themselves.

Clearly an Internet-only newspaper is a nonstarter. The Huffington Post, perhaps the most successful news website, relies largely on free labor and produces precious little of what we have traditionally understood to be “news.” Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis has made much of the fact that ad revenue for LATimes.com covers the cost of its newsroom and proposes that the Times go paperless. He forgets, however, that even without the costs of paper production and delivery, "backroom operations" for a newsroom can be almost as expensive as the cost of the reporters and editors. There's travel, technology, rent, business planning, ad sales, health insurance, pension payments and, well, plenty of things that make this calculation a net loser. Walter Isaacson, writing in Time, has proposed a program of micropayments to be made by the reader, but if these average out, as Michael Kinsley predicts, to just $2 a month, it won't come close to covering the costs of reporting, editing and distributing the news.