Did you think money was heaven sent?

"Lady Madonna, children at your feet.
Wonder how you manage to make ends meet.
Who finds the money when you pay the rent?
did you think that money was heaven sent"


Kudos to the Beatles for calling out the future; also known as the world economy in 2008-2009. Wonderful. If you haven't read the headlines anywhere lately, pull your head out of the sand. We're all on a course for potential demise.

Here in the UK, Merrill Lynch (a pretty hefty employer in the city) is cutting 1,900 city jobs. But, its not the only company in the city that's looking to lighten its load. Barclay's bank, famous to us Americans abroad for their lack of ATM withdraw fees and someone reasonable conversion rates, is looking into unloading 2,000 of their UK employees. In the journalism world, papers are retiring faster than 75 year-old men under a pension. Then again, everything's retiring faster than anyone over 60, thanks to the US's wonderful Social Security program that every one is paying into but 2/3s of the taxable public won't reap the benefits of.

Newspapers are all consolidating, dying out, and folding under because of the massive lack of advertisements as well as the advent of cheap internet news sources. Yes, we all recognize that the "new wave of media" per se is based entirely off of the new, shiny, digital frontier. Apple Computers has aided that "new wave" as a result of their iPhone, equipped with gobs of applications.

My study abroad group met today with technology people from a prominent British publication, who is not suffering quite as bad as many stateside papers (e.g. Chicago Trib and bankruptcy) -- this publication happened to move into a stellar, eco-friendly, brand-spanking new building. Anyways, we met with these two employees who were practically giddy with the advent of this usable technology. Twittering, blogging, face-booking, any kind of application with "-ing" at the end of it, you name it. All of this is considered to be tools for a journalist to utilze to convey real time news and the idea that "hey, we're not making this shit up, we actually went here, check our geo-tagging."

Frankly, its all a bit much to handle. But the horizon is more confusing than ever, seeing as there may very well be no newspapers to write for by the time graduation rolls around. All of these gadgets, widgets, and whatchamacallits are well and good in their own right, but what happened to the good old days with the intent of plan news uncluttered with gadgets? Take CNN, and the Situation Room's addiction to touch screens to draw, circle, and slash upon different regions of the US. One of these days John King is going to finger something inappropriate (that's what she said, anyone?) and then what will become of the touch screens?!


The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes, but it seems like things will only right themselves when hell freezes over. Happy 2009.