Have we read the last from newspaper reporter Billy Cox's De Void blog? My link list is about to become one entry short, unfortunately.
By way of a Billy Cox alert passed through Internet sources, initially via researcher Grant Cameron's web site, we're told that a corporate decision -- not blog content -- sentenced De Void to said termination. I could blubber on and on all day about this tremendous loss to, shall we say, UFO journalism (and I have always held a special place in my nevertheless wandering heart for newspaper reporters, the vanishing printing press breed who won't obscure truth behind sound bites or seconds-long brevity quenched by microphone & camera), but I'll shut up and take the liberty here of including in total the words of Billy Cox and my/our thanks for his superior UFO reportage. Will he return in another format? Don't count him out. Yet this, writes Billy:
Since a few of you have asked (3), yes, it’s official – Gannett killed my UFO blog, De Void, yesterday. I knew it was coming a week or two ago, but I’d asked an editor at the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota if he could keep the hounds at bay until Monday. He said yes. By time I tried to log on Friday afternoon to write a bon voyage piece, it was already too late, the site had been permanently disabled. Sorry – be quicker next time.
Before anybody goes QAnon, it had nothing to do with content, although that would’ve been a more preferable motive. The futurists at Gannett – the biggest newspaper chain in America – decided De Void wasn’t “performing” well enough. The purge from on high was billed as part of an across-the-board hose-down of all blogs and other initiatives that weren’t generating the metrics they wanted. There was no discussion, only the relayed word that Gannett had identified “Readability” in the SEO analytics as the problem.
OK, I’m not that vain. De Void was no great shakes. A lot of it was repetitive and florid with self-pity, and my “Readability” scores were pretty shitty. Here’s the readout on one blog alone: There were “3 consecutive sentences starting with the same word.” There were not “any subheadings.” There were more than 20 words in 39.7% of my sentences, which is “more than the recommended maximum of 25%. Try to shorten the sentences.”
Days earlier, I attended a mandatory company Zoomer about our marching orders going forward, so I knew where I’d fallen short. Wheezing red mist under a crush of a billion $ in debt, and with 99 percent of all ad revenues sucked up by Google and Facebook, Gannett is hitching its fortunes to digital subscriptions. But Stone Age laptop users alone won’t be enough to survive. The key is getting device-users to buy in. Which means trying to seduce smartphone attention spans into staying with a story for the length of a stoplight.
The key phrases were “scannability,” “infogram,” “digestible and mobile friendly,” and “meets them in places they look for news.” Don’t forget the “why it matters” nut graph. Or “bullet points.” And “how does it impact me?” All of which makes perfect sense. Like, when was the last time you were impacted by a UFO?
Anyway, my farewell De Void was going to be about why, as the only daily newspaper reporter in the United States blogging about UFOs since 2007, I was/still am optimistic over the future of media coverage. Between the phenomenon’s sprawling scope, the early stages of government accountability, and a sustained surge of public interest following the Defense Department’s release of those F-18 videos three years ago, a competitive growth industry has barely even gotten started. There’s more, but this is already way too long.
So. To those in pursuit – two words to the wise: shorter sentences.
The not-surprising Southern border blitz: The very fact that under international law Mexico was supposed to be the first country to deal with migrants makes this leftist and drug cartel-engineered exercise in invasion of the USA a border war like few others. Some cartel members are allegedly making several million dollars a day by sling-shooting children and adults into the country via high-tech or simply overwhelming operations. How long is the average American going to ignore the real threats while immersed instead in stupid video games, in televised athletic events mastered by a clash of self-serving egos or in marijuana legislation guaranteed to make us an even dumber society?
Taking the rectal temperature in corporate boardrooms: These folks are increasingly becoming infected with the WOKE virus, all of which is orchestrated by domestic and global thought terrorists, denizens of elite think tanks and social(ist) network punks bathed in too much privilege and an abundance of idle time on their hands. So, in light of MLB baseball suddenly leaving Atlanta, and in light of Coca-Cola, Delta, Dell and other major corporations cowing to the WOKE cult, may we suggest that you folks just continue selling your damned products and leave phony social tantrums behind? Regarding Georgia's new voting law, it appears that some corporate officials are unable to come up with a single reason why the new legal standards are unfair to "minorities." But the mainstream media will never belly up to the truth bar on this issue. And again: "Jim Crow" legislation of the past was the Democrats' baby, despite leftist lies. To throw Jim Crow to the wall of public opinion now and hope it sticks is so typical of this bunch.
Noah X and why are the streets quiet? Capitol (alleged, my butt) cop-killer Noah Green, dispatched to a well-deserved dirt nap by the courage of law enforcement, apparently having a preference for his Nation of Islam name, Noah X, was of course almost immediately removed from Facebook even as his family was prepared to moan, true enough I guess, the mental illness chant. While X's use of both an automobile and a knife to perpetrate his horrors for some reason did not cause car and knife-control advocates to march in neighborhood communities across the land, we did raise an eyebrow or two when it became strangely obvious that streets were quiet, period. That is, when George Floyd or other colored people (ref. NAACP spelled out, language geeks, don't blame me ) have succumbed at the hands of law enforcement in recent years, mobs routinely took to the streets, setting fires, burning cars and breaking windows and other inanimate objects -- um, yeah, sometimes people, too -- in "protest" while usually enduring the side benefit curse of a necessity to steal TVs, electronics and other goodies.
Yet, if we're going to stay racial 24/7, I must admit, it was rather amazing that this black-perpetrator-on-white-cop table-turning crime did not lead to gangs of white folk hitting city streets and going on an immature destructive or free TV-grabbing tour. Where was the white rage? Surely, Americans NOT of Col-Or have the same right as the street rats and thugs to demolish the taxpayer-funded public square, or to shoot, pistol-whip or destroy by any means necessary cops, business owners and shops obstructing their pathway to violent juvenile or infantile-level reactions.
Good grief, you white folk trash, how dare you quietly sit back and let American justice take its course without a display of idiotic physical and criminal input? This country is clearly going to hell in a hand basket (um, is hand basket a racist term?).
The President: Pardon my confusion, but I've seen his few speeches and I've watched him fall on airplane steps, so I can't resist asking: When the press states this President has been "briefed" on something, do they mean briefed. . .or Pampered? Hmm.
Tax us some more: The Biden syndicate continues to come up with big ideas funded by future you and I. If taxes are raised on corporations to help pay for an extraordinarily socialist agenda, corps will pass the increase on to the consumer. If Biden taxes the bejeezus out of the wealthy, the wealthy will find a way to escape this madness. To basically put a "hate tax" on businesses innocently engaged in American capitalism values puts the country on a collision course with disaster, as defined by our given rights. I am especially disturbed by -- more than once -- hearing Biden's minions talk about good-paying UNION jobs. Not just jobs. Because the previous multi-trillion bill already saved union pension funds (for now), it's only natural that declining unions would be clawing in the background, demanding that paid-off politicians exert influence to reinvigorate their almost ghostly carcasses. Biden's so-called "infrastructure" proposal, if passed, will insure a unionized grip on American workers and the people they used to serve when the country enjoyed more than a modicum of freedom in a free market society. In any case, it is essential to bear in mind that when Democrats speak of unity, unity is THEIR personal "dog whistle" warning of a commitment primarily and overwhelmingly to leftist goals. There just isn't much room for real compromise among Democrats and true conservatives (if one can actually find the latter in numbers of any consequence).
