Cross-posted from michiganliberal.com
A personal lesson today in the consequences of mega media consolidation.
This morning when I went to cruise the daily Michigan papers, something extraordinary happened: I couldn't connect to
any Gannett-owned newspaper. This includes the Detroit Free Press, the Lansing State Journal, the Livingston Daily Press-Argus, the Port Huron Herald Tribune, and the Battle Creek Enquirer. I couldn't connect to the Detroit News either - though it
used to be Gannett - and I suspect is hosted on the same server with the DFP under their so-called "joint operating agreement" (the DN is now owned by MediaNews Group). I couldn't connect with any out-of-state Gannett papers either - except USA Today.
Anyway, every other newspaper, every other blog, and every other website I went to worked just fine. And no one else I talked to had problems connecting to Gannett sites. Tried connecting at my office...no problem. But as of this writing, I
still can't access Gannett sites from home unless I use a third-party proxy server.
Is the nation's largest newspaper publisher out to get me? Am I a victim of a nefarious Republican plot? Or is this all just some absurd technological coincidence? Perhaps someone who knows more about how the Internet works than I can tell me (though I do have a few theories about what happened).
I would write someone an email about this, but I really haven't any idea who to send it to.
At any rate, in the same week that Google announced it is now
censoring the web for Red China and on the same day that Gannett
is talking with
MediaNews Group about ganging up to take over
Knight-Ridder, this seems to be a pretty bleak harbinger of the kind of thing we can expect with more media consolidation. Who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll wake up to find I can't connect to
any newspaper websites!
Yet one more reason to keep buidling a solid and healthy blogosphere! (Become a member of Michiganliberal.com
here! :)).