Sorry about your job... here's a blog!

I am a believer in the idea that the internet will be the future of newspapers, but something about this doesn't sound quite right:

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

I'm sure TypePad is just trying to do something nice for recently laid-off journalists, and someday this might be a really cool offer.  But at this point in time, it would just seem to add fuel to the Huffington Post way of thinking about the internet... like, "hey, exposure is just as good as money!"

I suppose the conclusion to draw is that it's just a shame newspapers have allowed their industry to get to this point, and haven't made more progress in making their product work on the internet (maybe, by extension, helping to make the internet a more reputable and profitable medium in general).  Of course, it's harder to do this when you've laid off all your talent.