The forces

I was talking with our labor lawyer the other day, a quick, down-to-earth, slightly raspy-voiced advocate, with a cadence that is like a twinkle in the eye, about our maternity leave policy. We at Courthouse News had looked around at other newspapers and settled on 16 weeks for the birth parent and 10 for the companion, which he thought was fine.

But in the meantime we got to talking about San Francisco where he works, or where he used to. His firm no longer keeps offices, instead everyone works from home. He described a downtown where office building vacancy rates are rising, where a downtown mall developer gave up and turned it back to the lender, where the homeless are surging, where there is higher crime and fewer police because the working population has dropped so much.

In just a few strokes, he had described a downtown on its way to dystopia. Or already there.

This is related, as I see it, but it will take a bit to explain. Today our social media editor asked if Courthouse News would pay for Twitter Blue (which I OK’d.)

“The benefits of Twitter Blue,” he wrote, “include the ability to edit tweets (within 30 minutes of posting), higher priority in users’ search results (they’re a little more likely to see our tweets), and Elon has temporarily introduced a limit to how many tweets accounts can see in a day. Twitter Blue users are currently able to see 10x as many tweets as users with free accounts. It’s possible that this is only temporary as it’s a fairly bad idea on his part but for now, I risk not being able to access our reporters’ tweets in order to retweet them. It would be $8 a month.”

So Musk is charging a monthly fee, not unlike Hulu or NBC Peacock or Netflix or Pandora — and in a similar price range — for those who want to avoid restrictions on use. In the past, the blue check mark was free but hard to get and arbitrarily assigned.

So, next notion, one of my summer idylls is watching the Tour de France winding through a generally lovely countryside this time year as the teams employ a variety of tactics to gain advantage and push their leader into the maillot jaune.

The stages were not being broadcast on cable TV except as short condensations more than a day later, making them a lot like stale bread or, ahem, old civil complaints. So I signed up for NBC’s streaming service Peacock Plus at $10 a month. And it’s great, no commercials, full international feed of the race.

Now this example may seem like a stretch but it’s related. We beat the NY Times and the Post and just about everybody else last week in publishing CNS reporter Kelsey Reichmann’s story on the Supreme Court decision against using race in college admissions. But in researching Google on who published when, Courthouse News did not show up.

Our tech consultant said we needed to ask, beseech, the boss of the internet, to be placed within the Google News App, so that Google can sell ads using our content. We did that and now our scoops can be seen and measured as opposed to our stories disappearing into an internet black hole. The consultant added, “Important: Google will still dictate what gets shown (and to who). Happy 4th.”

Dictate is the operative word. Gannett recently filed an antitrust action against Google saying it has a monopoly on the ad market, and, as I said when I saw the suit, “They’re right.”

And last little thing, a beep. I drove back to Pasadena from an eye appointment at Scripps in La Jolla last week. Cruising along State Route 73 through Orange County, I heard my transponder beep. I was of course paying for the unencumbered road. Then I hit the public Interstate 405, and my speed dropped from 75 to 10 (It was a dumb way to get to Pasadena, I should have listened to the Apple lady).

My point here is a simple and obvious one. The forces that have taken over the course of our lives — and that have in many ways made them more comfortable and better — are also dividing us into have nots who live hard, at times dystopia-hard, and the haves who pay for music, streaming television, an open road and even the ability to be heard.

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