Yeah? Then you probably get paid better than me, too! Suck it up!

I'm a small-town newspaper editor. I'm feeling the pain, though not nearly as bad as most papers are. We're independent, so we actually have to run as a business and not as an overleveraged financial con game, the way so many large news chains are these days. This turns out to mean that we weather the storm far better than the big guys.

The Associated Press' recent saber-rattling in Google's direction is, I believe, nothing more than some moguls' desperate attempt to wring some cash out of some successful Internet companies on their way out the door. The fact is that there was always a five-minute remedy to the supposed wrongs done to them -- robots.txt -- will probably devastate their case. But who knows? Maybe they figure they can get some go-away money. The legal system doesn't always go the way you might expect it to.

That said, Schmidt's idea that newspapers should live in fear of "pissing off" readers is fatuous and lame, and exactly wrong. Sure, this should be the case when it comes to usability -- by all means, get the info in front of eyeballs any way you can, and with the absolute minimum amount of pain on the user's end. That should be everyone's goal.

But then there's content, and here it is absolutely essential to risk pissing off your readers with every issue. The news people need to hear -- the news that it's important for them to hear -- is bad news. The fact that you print bad news is going to inevitably piss people off. Maybe a lot of people. You want news that pisses no one off? You're asking for a Chamber of Commerce newsletter, not a newspaper. And look how well read those are.

There could be something to this. Until this year, my only experience as a programmer had been in high school. As in, I wrote BASIC scripts on my Atari 800. It was a big part of my identity at the time, but it hasn't been for about 20 years. Now, all of a sudden I'm finding myself doing all sorts of things for the small company I work for. I'm just finishing up a medium-scale system that will track our fairly complex accounting systems. I took it upon myself to do this: A) because I saw how inefficiently it was being done previously, B) we can't afford a real programmer and C) I saw that I could do it, even though I haven't been in the programming game for ages, because I had started toying around with Rails just out of curiousity. I'll admit out front that any of you could probably write the application I'm building more quickly than I could, and in the language/platform of your choice, and it would likely look a lot better and more flashy than my version of it will. But my version functions perfectly so far, and it'll still have some advantages. I know our needs first-hand, so I know going in what we need done -- we don't have to explain things to an outsider. Down the road, if we need to tweak or extend it, I'll be able to do it myself. How much of this is due to Rails and how much is due to the fact that there was a buried little programmer inside me itching to get out -- that I don't know.