Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Philly Newspapers Sold At Their 1969 Price

In 1969 a gallon of gas cost 35 cents. So you could filler'up for about five bucks.
You could buy a new home for less than $16,000 or rent one for about $150 a month.
A new Toyota Corona? About $2,000.
And the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 800.
And that was the same year that Walter Annenberg sold the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News for $55 million. That was considered a nice piece of change for the already multi-millionaired Annenberg. Nice indeed.
But yesterday the two newspapers and their website (philly.com) sold for exactly the same price.
How many things today sell for the same price that they did in 1969?
Still, if you turn back the clock you'll also find that in 1969 a tweedy Canadian professor named Marshall MacLuhan was declaring that "The Gutenberg age is over." Shockingly, MacLuhan not only pronounced the death of newspapers but of all things print-on-paper.
They were linear; the future is non-linear, he said.
That was 1969.
That was 43 years ago.

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