Tuesday 10 February 2009

An open letter to Londoners

Already started

Depressing

Creepy!

Dear Londoners,

Why are you wasting your brains reading the tripe free papers on the tube? In the morning on the way to work, in the evening coming home from work - don't you have anything more interesting to occupy yourself with during your commute? Read a book, listen to some music, knit your granny a scarf, take photos of other passengers for your blog, create a plan for world domination, but quit being so mindlessly lazy! The papers are free for a reason - because they are full of crap - no one would buy them if they charged money, so why take them for free?

Sure, shared cultural knowledge is important - but being able to stand around the water cooler in the morning and go "ooooohhhh, I heard that Pete Doherty is havin' a cocaine breakdown, so he is" is pathetic. It's not enriching, enticing, illuminating, or mind-expanding. It's just nonsense.

On the tube you all look like zombies, carrying out your master's bidding. I'm not going to go all Chomsky-lite and suggest that the "powers that be" are brainwashing you with their not-news news in order to keep you from being aware of the crap your business men and politicians are getting up to while you're entranced by Prince William's "will he, won't he" love life, but seriously how hard is it to just chuck a book in your bag the night before and keep it there until you're finished reading it. Always wanted to read Anna Karenina or War and Peace but "never had the time"? You'll get through a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky in no time if you read it on the tube. Read something that will move you or make you happy in the morning, don't settle for the bullshit doom,
gloom, and celebrity stalking propagated by the shite papers.

Free your minds, people. Free your minds.

Yours with concern,

Crystal

Now's that's better.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should of started by addressing your letter to Number 10.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2009/02/paper_monitor_621.shtml

Phoenecia said...

That is such a depressing news story... I'm down with the UK, right, and I like living in London, but sometimes I just do not get the people. A Prime Minister who thinks he can understand his constituents by reading the London Metro?! Hilarious and worrying at the same time.

Anonymous said...

I hope your letter does some good. As an article in the Guardian suggested yesterday, taking a free paper only encourages more free newspapers to try their hand at crap journalism:

"The London Paper lost nearly £17m in the first 10 months after its launch, with City analysts estimating that it now loses in the high teens of millions annually. The other free paper distributed by hand outside tube and rail stations, London Lite, which is stable-mate to Metro at the DMGT subsidiary Associated Newspapers, is believed to lose between £10m and £15m each year."

"So why are two big successful newspaper companies continuing to blow millions scrapping over free newspapers? Lucrative advertising revenue is the answer, says Richard Hitchcock, an analyst for Numis Securities. According to some reports, London's free newspapers are faring well against an overall industry trend for falling ad revenues. "While in the short-term there are cyclical risks, I think the overall trends are positive - readership is growing and advertising revenue will follow this and so too will profitability," Hitchcock says."

Quail said...

The METRO is regurgitated tripe and a sure sign of cheapness.