global warming? not for newspapers

Clay Shirky offers no eulogy for the Tribune Co., which today announced bankruptcy. Instead, he shovels up a pile of told-you-so.

So I'm calling bullshit on the Rosenbaum thesis, because no one has been "caught up in this great upheaval." Caught up? That makes it sound like a tornado. This change has been more like seeing oncoming glaciers ten miles off, and then deciding not to move.

By the turn of the century, anyone who didn't understand that the business model for newspapers was a wasting asset was caught up in nothing other than willful ignorance, so secure in their faith in the permanence of their business that they assumed that those glaciers would politely swerve at the last minute, which minute is looking increasingly like now.

Anyone want to buy the Cubs and rename them the Polar Bears?