Award for Crappiest Area Newspaper

Glance through the assortment of local newspapers at your local library and you'll probably come to the same conclusion I arrived at this week -- The Kansas City Call and the Kansas City Kansan are running neck and neck for the annual "Ted Textor Award for Horrific-ness in Local Print Journalism".

Both publications have been reduced to subsidiaries of all the bland wire services we see in every other mediocre publication. It's a cornucopia of Ads, while being totally void of original content and actual reporting.

I'm giving the slight edge right now to the Kansan. Already the Kansan (owned by the Liberty Publishing Group) has managed to get its other publication shut down. The Shawnee Journal-Herald had a nice run of over 80 years in its respective community, until the current 'leadership' of the Kansan ran it into the ground. So in comes the Shawnee Dispatch (courtesy of the Lawrence-based World Company) to gobble up the market. While the Kansan publishes Tuesday through Saturday, it would probably be best to reduce it to a once or twice a week publication until the decide to start putting some decent content together on a daily basis.

The Call deserves mention as well. It's hard to distinguish the Call anymore from Church newsletters. That's about the level of news-gathering their putting into it these days. You feel sorry for the businesses that advertise with these sorry rags. But it's really all most companies can afford to do.


Abolish Government Mail Distribution...now!!!!

A classified in the Johnson County Sun states that the USPS has position openings that will pay from $17-59/hour! (The latter works out to about $123,000/yr.)

I wish I had read that wrong. With the exceptions of Baghdad and Kabul, is their anymore depressing place on earth than the government-run post office? This turkey is subsidized left and right, and bleeds money every year. They'll never be FedEx or UPS, so naturally their inviting "Green Cards" to apply and fill their offices. It's 2005 and we're still paying taxes to these assholes when any number of businesses can handle the responsibility of delivering me my junk mail. If you've ever worked in the shipping business for five minutes, you'd understand the difference between private couriers versus the first class incompetence on display at your local USPS.

We'll never be so lucky as to see this actually happen. Ashcroft and his band of terror groupies made sure that the government would be keeping tabs on all mail transactions for the next century.