In a column in Monday’s New York Times,  David Carr became the latest media watcher to suggest that newspapers start charging for their content online. After citing some fallen papers (Rocky Mountain News) and some that are teetering on the edge (San Francisco Chronicle), Carr said some other ostriches could still save their necks by making people pay.

“The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country,” he wrote, “and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue.” In any other business this might seem like common sense but as anyone who recalls the evolution of newspapers online can attest, the folks who insisted on charging for the news used to be considered the ostriches.

Like Walter Isaacson, whose Feb 5 story in Time, “How to Save Your Newspaper,” Carr suggested to those hooked on freebies that the party is now over. And he doesn’t just mean the individual consumers, of whom the young are the worst. (Every semester I ask kids in my New School journalism class how many read the paper and nearly every hand goes up; when I ask them how many pay for it you would think I was asking for volunteers for active duty in Afghanistan.) He means the “aggregators” and “framers,” from the Huff Post to the Daily Beast, that are essentially playing on someone else’s dime. They might squeal that they are driving traffic to the papers’s sites when they quote them at length, but if that traffic is not yielding any profit, what good does it do the paper to provide reporting — the costly, boots-on-the-ground, reporter-on-the-phone kind that most bloggers only know from movies — to pundits if they can’t keep paying the reporter?

Because that’s what it comes down to. My wife emailed me today about a reporter who had contacted her from Arizona. He’d been laid off at his paper, another paper fighting extinction, and was now working in (wait for it) a prison. (One of our nation’s last growth industries!) The difficult job of gathering news — and not just gathering it but writing it and putting it in a context that you can understand, whether that context be our banking system or the Sahara Subcontinent — should be met with more respect.

As far as the millions of readers who would refuse to pay for what they used to get free, well, maybe we’ll end up with two-class society, those who are informed about the events of the world and those who only know what they see on South Park or hear on Rush. Come to think of it, we’re already there.

I guess seeing David Byrne don a white tutu for his encore performance of “Burning Down the House” at Radio City Music Hall last night could have been expected. (Actually it should have been expected, since our friend Annie-B Parson, who choreographed the show, warned us about it; I just forgot.) I always thought that Talking Heads‘ song was about nonconformity, or maybe just the dangers of living the expected life (“I don’t know what you expect staring into the TV set/Fight fire with fire”), and nothing says nonconformity like a grown man wearing a tutu. 

A white tutu, mind you, over his nice white suit, which went nicely with his white man-from-Glad hair. The band was dressed all in white, too — like sous chefs, one critic said (though I found the effect more evocative of the laboratory) and sure enough, Byrne began the evening in low-key fashion, walking us through “the menu”: We would start with some samplings from his new collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today; a number from their first album, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts; at least one song from his solo effort, The Catherine Wheel; and a hefty dose of ditties from the Heads albums produced by Eno. 

The latter were the biggest crowd pleasers, of course,  though some of my favorite moments came when the dancers (also clad in white) added hula-like hand movements to new songs like “One Fine Day” and “Everything That Happens.” Byrne always seemed to be sending semaphore signals to us through his music, from the darkest period of the eighties (“Our president’s crazy/Did you hear what he said?”) to these equally economically troubled, yet politically promising, times. 

“When the seasons start to slip/when the tight rope walker slips/I’m counting on the possibilities,” he warbled in his weird burr on “Big Nurse” and his optimism was contagious, as was his nonconformity. Did I mention that, at the end of the show, everyone was wearing a tutu? 

“Have you heard among this clan/I am called ‘the forgotten man’?” Cole Porter could have written that lyric for rock promoter Bill Graham if Saturday’s Wall Street Journal was any indication. There, on the front page, accompanying a piece about Irving Azoff (“Can He Save Rock ‘n’ Roll?”) was an old photo with this caption: “Ticketmaster’s Irving Azoff with the Eagles in the 70s; his Live Nation merger is stirring up controversy.” There, between the band and the promoter, was Graham, larger than life (certainly larger than Azoff) but not big enough any more to rate a mention. 

Maybe the omission was a matter of space but even an editorial decision not to include the late impresario says plenty. (First, that he is not here to scream at the whatever hapless fuck happened to pick up the phone on the day he called the Journal.) What’s ironic is that the controversy surrounding the proposed merger — which would make a megacompany that is both artist manager and concert promoter — is one he would have sunk his teeth into. Literally. 

Because in his day, Graham was THE promoter who must be obeyed. Crossing him (or even letting extra money get made on his premises without him dipping his beak) was an invitation to a brawl. Of course, he was much hated by rockers and their management who accused him of (among other things) selling extra tickets to sold-out shows and pocketing the money himself. He was old-school, and could even play the thug, but I think he was fundamentally decent and even had good taste. The only time I ever saw him dancing at one of his own shows was the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense tour…

And for all who hated him — bands that couldn’t get booked in his venues, fans who hated his monopoly and pricing, critics who had to grovel before his people for press passes — he hated ten more back. He had an enemies list as long as Nixon’s. One of my favorite anecdotes about Graham came from the 1982 US Festival, a superconcert funded by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who didn’t know the first thing about putting on a show. 

After weeks of mismanagement by former est people the Woz had hired, new agers woefully unprepared to deal with egos as monumental as those behind Van Halen and the Clash, Graham was called in. He couldn’t stand the touchy-feelie way business was being done and at one morning “centering session,” one of the est leaders asked everyone attending to close their eyes, make a mental list of the people they had a problem with — and then visualize ripping it up. When the exercise was over and everyone was blinking and smiling, Graham’s eyes were still shut. 

“Bill?” one of his assistants said. “We’re done here.”

“Shhh,” said Graham. “I’m still writing.”

People keep expecting the new depression to look like the old Depression: soup-lines, Hoovervilles, Fireside Chats. Instead they get food pantries, unemployment lines (that benefit came courtesy FDR, remember) and Jon Stewart. Humor is the new tonic, it seems; how else explain NBC’s decision to turn its weekday evenings into one long Tonight Show? 

Bluegrass musician Del McCoury, a pure revivalist who I have been listening to forever, has made an interesting foray into depression expression. His new album, Living in Moneyland, is bookended by actual Fireside chats, and mixes 1930s Depression standards (Breadline Blues) with Merle Haggard’s 1970s recession classic, If We Make It Through December, with some newer material by Patty Loveless, Bruce Hornsby, Emmylou Harris etc. (Del even wrote one: 40 Acres and a Fool, about some pre-bust bozo lording his wealth over his less fortunate neighbors.)

There are populist themes in all of this, including some potentially ugly resentment about outsourcing, but mostly I think the singer is trying to tap into the fear and anger felt by a lot of Americans looking at the specter of a dark decade to come. Judging from some of the comments on the album’s message board, not all traditional music fans are happy. 

“For him to denigrate our remnants of Capitalism, the only system that allows talented individuals like himself to objectively prosper, is a humorous spectacle,” reads one post. “The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from Del’s many ‘calls to action’ is that he’s supporting the cause for more government meddling in the economy, more income redistribution and more sacrifice of individuals for the sake of the collective.”

Yeah, when in doubt call the hillbilly a commie! Some things actually haven’t changed. But it’s worth noting where I purchased Living in Moneyland. I stopped in at the local Circuit City, which is going out of business. Seeing as  how I live in downtown Brooklyn, there wasn’t a lot of competition for the country music. The place was being stripped down to the walls — great bargains on TVs, CD players, DVDs! Hurry! Sale ends soon. Everything must go. 

A piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that local affiliates of what were once called the Big Three networks are hurting; viewership is down almost ten percent in some markets (like Las Vegas) and these are so-called free stations: the sevens and elevenses of ABC, for instance. 

They are suffering for the usual reasons: TV on demand, the explosion of choices on cable, the general disinterest in news and the world (all the stranger as the world often seems poised to implode). And of course, as station managers and producers struggle for solutions, no one is saying, ‘Hey, maybe we should make local programming smarter!”

Opposite day! On CNN you can see the creep has moved the other direction, imitating the happy-talk of local news (and national morning shows) all day until Wolf Blitzer appears in the afternoon, like some scold, to remind class there are serious political issues to discuss. Only to then proceed to discuss them in the usual bipartisan, sound-bite fashion with the usual parade of authors and think-tank pundits and (of course) the best political team on television. 

Until Wolf arrives, though, the substitute teachers rule, with John Roberts literally playing the fool in the morning and the reporters trying to outdo each other on the dumb-and-dumber front. Just this morning I heard a report about how Detroit is trying to attract Hollywood in the wake of the success of Gran Torino. “Before there was the Big Three, Motown had this big three!” the reporter said, showing footage of the Supremes.

Huh? You mean the singers of the sixties predated the auto industry? Why, then, did the label call itself Motown, ie Motor City? How stupid can you be? Tune in tomorrow to find out.