The cost of a full-page weekday ad in the print edition of the LA Times, reaching 500,000 people is about $50,000.

The cost of a ad on LATimes.com to reach the same 500,000 people is about $7,000.

The cost of an ad reaching 500,000 people that’s served up by Google and appears on LATimes.com can be as little as $20.

Looking at those figures, it’s easy to see why companies have all but moved completely to web-based advertising.

The problem is two-fold: First, when you pay for a subscription to a print product, you almost certainly read it… cover-to-cover. When you view web pages for news, you almost certainly either block the ads, or have grown so used to them that you don’t even see them. So while it’s cheaper to advertise on the web, it is my opinion that most companies are throwing their money away. They fall in love with social media shares/likes, click-through rates, page views, and a host of other analytics—but they fail to accept the only number that counts: sales!

The second problem is that due to the first, journalism has devolved into click-bait producing bloggers being paid $25 per post to “report the news.” They do this because they can’t afford to pay real journalists to investigate stories and spend time crafting something worth paying for. And because of that, I’m not willing to pay for it.

It’s a vicious circle.

1. Open Automator from your apps folder.
2. If a menu pops up asking what you want to do, select Custom.
3. In the Actions list on the far left, click Utilities.
4. In the list just to the right of that, double-click Print Finder Items.
5. The Print Finder Items box will pop-up on the far right of the Automator window.
6. Choose the printer you want to set up to print from the drop-down menu. Don’t worry about those tags underneath the drop-down menu.
7. Go to the File menu and select Save As Plugin…
8. Give it a name (probably something like “print to XYZ printer”, or something like that). Choose Finder from the drop-down menu.
9. That’s it. Now all you have to do is right click on a file in the Finder, scroll down to More>Automator>”name of your printer command”. The file will print.
10. There is no #10, but I like even numbers. If you really want a #10, you could repeat the process for each printer you have, or choose the PDF Printer driver from the list (if you have Acrobat Pro installed) to have a file converted to PDF without opening it, hitting print, and clicking the PDF button in the print dialog box.

I wish there was a way to have the Print option show up at the top level of the Finder’s contextual menu, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it. Still, it’s a much nicer solution than having icons for all your printers scattered on your desktop.