In Germany? Today? No way.
Or way?
Hard to say.
Uh. German anti-Facebook technophobia is one thing, but like what on earth were they thinking (or drinking?) over there at the Süddeutsche Zeitung when they put out this one?
“If anyone has any doubts about the anti-Semitic dimension of the cartoon, we can point to Mark Zuckerberg’s very prominent nose, which is not the case in real life.”
Sozialtourismus has just been selected by the Brain Police as Germany’s Unwort des Jahres (non-word of the year). It means “social tourism” and is terribly cynical and politically incorrect as it refers to “unwanted immigrants from eastern Europe” who come to Germany to presumably milk all the wonderful social benefits here, something of course social tourists from eastern Europe or elsewhere would never, ever do.
Non-word of the year? The year has just begun, hasn’t it? And there are way more cool non-words out there that are much more deserving, if you ask me (I know you didn’t, but I’m telling you anyway). How about Superpenner (Super Bum), for instance? Bum is totally politically incorrect, too (that is what they used to call the homeless) and super is, well, super. So there.
Anyway, in case you didn’t know, Superpenner is a new comic action hero who has now arrived to save Berlin. And it’s about freakin’ time, too. To save it from all of those Straßenfeger (street sweeper) newspaper salesmen who accost us with their sales pitches in the U-Bahn all day long. I can hear it already: “Now with the Supperpenner comic book!”
Berlins Straßen haben einen neuen Helden: Den Superpenner – wenn auch nur auf dem Papier. Der Comic-Actionhero soll den Absatz der Berliner Obdachlosenzeitung Straßenfeger steigern.
And vigorously push for any and all legislation aimed at making life for Google & Co. as difficult as newsworthyly possible. They seem to have three main bad reasons, as far as I can tell, like I said, but if you can come up with any others, please don’t hesitate to let me know:
1) The Google News aggregate makes money off said German newspaper publishers by displaying snippets of said German newspaper publishers’ stories, only… Google doesn’t make any money with Google News by virtue of the simple fact that Google doesn’t place any advertising on Google News pages so, well, there is no German newspaper publisher money here to be made off with.
2) Google shamefully steals readers away from said newspaper publishers’ publications because, uh… Google News is actually one of the major sources of traffic to these German newspaper sites so, well, it’s the publishers who are getting the readers and making the money off of Google.
3) Google needs to be controlled ever more closely with ever stricter regulation and be restricted from including any of these said news articles without a publisher’s expressed written permission to “opt in” because, well… These newspapers can already “opt out” any old time they like simply by having their webmasters do so (a simple change to the robots.txt file will suffice).
And now that all of these outraged German publishers have decided to opt in to Google News anyway – now that they have been given the choice to do so – well, that makes all of this yet another typically complex German news story all in its own write and one which of course nobody else who is not German will be able to understand just right yet.
German Newspaper Publishers Seem Not To Understand Google News
Or Totgesagte leben länger (there’s life in the old dog yet)?
Last week, the Frankfurter Rundschau filed for bankruptcy. The DAPD press agency had already gone down a few weeks earlier.
Now the German business daily Financial Times Deutschland has become “the latest casualty of the chill winds sweeping the global newspaper industry.”
What was that I read while surfing the other day again? Stuff printed on dead trees? What’s that?
“Ich werde Eure kurzweilige Art zu schreiben wahnsinnig vermissen! Die FTD ist eine tolle Zeitung und ich hoffe, dass ihr wenigstens online weitermachen könnt!”
It’s here (the German “summer hole“). So get used to it. And remember: If it wasn’t for slow news (see yesterday’s post), we wouldn’t have no news at all.
Or as one paper here put it: “Exotic Animals in a Summer Loch Ness.”
Hey, news is a product, folks. And production is down.
In the United States the period is referred to prosaically as the slow news season.
Oh yeah, I forgot. There’s no such thing as International Men’s Day.
So much for tradition. The emasculated male staff at Germany’s Bild newspaper not only gave the women employees the day off on International Women’s Day this Thursday, they must have had too much to drink afterwards, too, because later that day the crazy bastards announced that the paper would be removing its trademark pictures of topless women from the front page.
How sweet or something. Sickening sweet. Now 28 years and 5000 topless women later we, I mean you, will be forced to turn to page three if you want to see them again (and we all know who they are). I feel so disgusted. And degraded.
So this is like progress marching on?
“I’m pleased that the pictures have finally disappeared from the front of the paper but the question is how long it will stay away. It was very degrading but we will have to wait and see whether this is permanent,” said Monika Lazar, women’s spokeswoman for the Green party.
Degrading, lady? Hell yeah, it’s degrading. Why degrade these women by putting them on page three?
What? Reprinting actual Nazi newspapers from the 1930’s and allowing German Menschen (people) in the year 2009 to actually, gulp, read them? Why that’s, why that’s… That’s history!
Das Unheil (calamity) always comes from somewhere else, you see (Hitler was an Austrian, for instance). Now it’s coming from England (even Germans get tired of reading about US-Amerika all the time). Some British terrorist journalist type has somehow managed to manipulate a Bavarian court that just ruled he can continue to publish his annotated “Witness Reports” series down there.
This is bad or something I guess because Germans are more susceptible to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s than others are I suppose and like with hypnosis I assume they are pre-programmed or even genetically predetermined to start foaming at the mouth and marching into Poland whenever things like this get published I guess, again (funny how you can’t get them to march into southern Afghanistan though).
Alles ist verboten was nicht ausdrücklich erlaubt ist.
Observing Hermann 