Follow The Absence Of Money

A friend of the blog emails:

St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly.

I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free would “crush” something more expensive. That’s usually what is said of Walmart- they offer things so cheaply that the small businesses can’t compete. In this case, what is the issue? Free publications can’t compete with more expensive subscription news? Or is it actually can’t compete with better sources online that are also free? Is that capitalism? I guess maybe it is because we here in the USA do have lots of choice and are also free to start another weekly in City Pages place. So, if that choice and opportunity bothers Mitra Jalali, just what alternative does she want for us?

I suspect councilwoman Jalali – who was “Mitra Jalali-Nelson” until having a hint of Scandinavian became a negative in Metro DFL politics – knows this.

I suspect she, like all DFL pols, knows her voters don’t think about it all that hard, and that nobody in the media is ever going to make an issue of it.

Posted

November 23, 2020

Business, The Economy and The Markets, Lefty “Alt”-Media, Media, Media Bias

Mitch Berg

Tags:

Comments

8 responses to “Follow The Absence Of Money”

Greg

November 23, 2020

Ms Mitra Jalali-Nelson represents Ward 4, which includes Merriam Park and Mac-Groveland, neighborhoods where people are wealthy enough to detest capitalism.
golfdoc50

November 23, 2020

The economic illiteracy of lefties is wondrous to behold. City Pages’ revenue came from advertising by entertainment venues. Thanks to government edict, those ceased to exist. Bye bye income.
Maximum Overlord

November 23, 2020

golfDoc, I wonder if she means that the Strib shut down City Pages because Strib is a for-profit newspaper.
Some people have a mental tic that demands the same central evil is responsible for all wickedness. Find “capitalism” somewhere in the chain of events and “capitalism” is the essential cause.
Cf. “whiteness” being the essential cause of the death of all black men at the hands of the police, and “Trump” being the cause of death for two hundred thousand plus Americans whose death certificates say “covid-19.”
bikebubba

November 23, 2020

Huh. The model was obviously that they were going to support the paper, I just wonder why nobody wanted to associate their company’s name with it. Maybe all the progressive companies that otherwise would have advertised there decided not to after the city taxed their target audience out of their target market?
bikebubba

November 23, 2020

And darn that fascistic, reactionary Star-Tribune for cutting the cord just because they couldn’t sell advertising!
Maximum Overlord

November 23, 2020

Was it City Pages or the the Reader that in trouble for allowing its personals section to be used for sex trafficcing?
This was back in the 80s, so there is nothing about it on the internet.
Speaking of which, if congress gets rid of section 230 of the CDA, how long do you think that it will take for twitter & facebook to look like the old usenet? All porn & spam?
bosshoss429

November 23, 2020

MO,
Yea, about three years ago, Craigslist decided to dump their “Personals” section, for that very reason, as well as the murders from some psycho that used it to lure victims.
Pete Strunk

November 24, 2020

Just when Minneapolis gets a downtown Dollar Genwral, you lose your paper of record.

Sad.

It was bound to happen, though. Degenerates stopped reading and placing ads in the paper once the action moved to grade schools and libraries.