The circulation figures for the top 25 dailies in the US are out, and they're horrifying. The median decline is well into the teens; only the Wall Street Journal gained (very slightly).
I think we're witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren't there. At some point, industries enter a death spiral: too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers. That drives more customers away. Rinse and repeat . . .
For twenty years, newspapers have been trying to slow the process with increasingly desperate cost cutting, but almost all are at the end of that rope; they can't cut their newsroom or production staff any further and still put out a newspaper. There just aren't enough customers who are willing to pay for their product what it costs to produce it.
The numbers seem to confirm something I've thought for a while: we're eventually going to end up with a few national papers, a la Britain, rather than local dailies. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times (sorry, conservatives!) are weathering the downturn better than most, and it's not surprising: business, politics, and national upper-middlebrow culture. But in 25 years, will any of them still be printing their product on the pulped up remains of dead trees? It doesn't seem all that likely.
I met a freelancer this weekend who is doing all the things that most journalists did to get where they are, writing on the margins of the news business in the hopes of getting up enough of a portfolio to worm her way into the center. I wanted to give her hope . . . but the fact is, at the center there are now more existing journalists than jobs for them, meaning the outsiders have very little chance.
Maybe there will be jobs, online. But if so, more web outfits are going to have to get into the habit of paying salaries that will support an adult middle-class life. Right now, a lot of web outfits tend to churn through twenty-somethings who are also building their resumes . . . but I'm not sure how well this works in a world where a job churning out blog copy for pennies a word is the last stop in a journalistic career, rather than the first.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Can someone tell me which of the 25 papers(in the piece Megan linked to) has a liberal editorial board? It requires more than just: "But they endorsed Obama!!"
What does it require? And if you have something in mind, why not do your own research?
Would you accept Obama, Kerry and Gore?
This is the closest thing to a list I've found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_United_States_presidential_elections
The bigger problem for non-lefties is the straight news. Left-liberals strongly self-select into journalism (Pew has found them skewing liberal for decades), and that inevitably colors coverage.
Many of the papers in Megan's link have a liberal or left-of-center editorial bias.
But, so what?
This list isn't representative of influence, which is what counts when dividing the partisan playing field. And when one looks at influence, left-of-center bias dominates the entire field of journalism — not just editorial boards.
Anyone who doesn't realize this obvious fact of life is likely so far to the left as to have lost the use of their left hemisphere.
The "liberal media" has to be one of the biggest lies told by the Fox news crowd, especially when you consider that most newspapers are owned by multi-billion dollar corporations.
Yes, you can claim that some papers are liberal on the editorial page. The Washington Post & The New York Times may appear liberal to what passes for a conservative these days. But you can also identify extremely conservative newspapers - The Washington Times & The Wall Street Journal, for example.
No definitive study has been done on the "liberalness" of all newspapers, only a series of snapshots that proves at a given time, a newspaper may appear liberal or conservative. There is more evidence to show that conservative newspaper owners have disabled newspapers with cost-cutting for profit.
As for liberals self-selecting into journalism, what an odd statement. Are conservatives too dumb to infiltrate mediums that still have tremendous influence over how people behave? Is "liberalness" tied to education level? Or are today's conservatives too busy posting on message boards and blogs?
Let's face it, there is lot of evidence that most Americans are center to left of center. The idea that most are conservative flies in the face of the audience for news shows at the "liberal networks" - 20 million plus - and the audience for Fox - 3.5 million.
(For more information of how Americans vote on the issues that divide liberals and conservatives, I suggest you read "Why We Are Liberal" by Eric Alterman.)
At best, the networks and newspapers reflect their audiences, and that's what really annoys conservatives. They're a minority that wants to run things.
One thing I can say for certain, no liberal thinks of the networks or the newspapers when they hear "liberal media." As my favorite tennis player has said, "You cannot be serious."
I would suggest that Rothman and Lichter's work from the 80's puts this to rest, but, I haven't seen many recent studies. Perhaps their work has been "overtaken by events" as they say in the news biz?
a) Studies, perusals of OpenSecrets, etc, repeatedly show that the media is overwhelmingly Democratic.
b) Unless they're pretty hard left, it's fairly obvious to anyone who's ever worked in journalism that the newsroom--not the editorial page--tilts overwhelmingly to the left of the American public. And it's not hard to pick out where this shows up in their coverage.
Depends on what you mean by "newsroom." In my experience, reporters generally tended to tilt left, but there was certainly a mix of political philosophy just like in the real world - one of my favorite colleagues was an evangelical Christian. Business reporters are much more likely to tilt right. Editors were a mixed bag, but plenty tilted to the right, and more so at the managing and executive editor levels. Publishers dined openly at Lincoln Club and Chamber breakfasts.
None of which has anything to do with why circulation is dropping across the board.
As for liberals self-selecting into journalism, what an odd statement. Are conservatives too dumb to infiltrate mediums that still have tremendous influence over how people behave?
They're generally less interested in advocacy.
Let's face it, there is lot of evidence that most Americans are center to left of center
Nope.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/123854/Conservatives-Maintain-Edge-Top-Ideological-Group.aspx
Also, comparing networks to cable is a bit silly.
Has anyone heard of "conflicted conservatives"? I'm not so sure we can rely on all individuals to accurately self-report a mapping of their preferences onto ideological labels.
I too used to work in a newsroom, but I disagree completely that "there [is] certainly a mix of political philosophy" in newsrooms. I found that most reporters are so blind to their own liberalism, they just can't see it. I think it stems from an undiscerning assumption that fellow reporters and editors are "just like in the real world," that is, that they pretty much represent the full range of political thought in America.
Just ask how many of your colleagues vote Republican, believe in the superiority of free-enterprise capitalism, are adamantly against abortion, own a gun for self-protection? Are these silly questions to ask? No, because in any given newsroom, you will find the vast majority are 100% the opposite: always vote Democratic or Socialist (if a candidate is on the ticket), think capitalism is basically flawed, deeply believe in abortion on demand, have never been near a gun and do not want to be.
I bet most people in newsrooms would dismiss these questions with a chuckle, but these issues are fundamentally important to millions of Americans -- few if any of whom work in newsrooms.
You can't be serious. Or, you need to get out more often. Or both.
"...we're eventually going to end up with a few national papers, a la Britain, rather than local dailies."
As a former newspaper person, I see it a bit differently. Yes, most of the major metro papers are finished, and while a few national papers will survive, we're seeing a lot local weekly papers that cater to specific towns sprouting up to fill the local news void. These small papers are free to readers, subsist on ad revenue, and do a good job of reporting regional and local news that the national papers and local TV news can't cover.
"The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times (sorry, conservatives!) are weathering the downturn better than most..."
The Journal is hanging on, but it also has Murdoch's enormous resources behind it (which is nice). The jury is still out on the Post, whose parent company is doing OK but the paper itself is still losing money and readers. The only reason the NYT is still around is because of Carlos Slim's money, that the company has to pay hefty interest on. In a few years, I think the Times may still exist as a brand, but the paper as we know it today will no longer exist.
Murdoch has actually bought up some of the weeklies that serve various boroughs of New York City. I have no idea what the game plan is, but I suspect that News Corp. has something in mind.
Yeah, I didn't want to burst Megan's bubble, but the gray lady is getting grayer by the minute. The NYT will basically become the largest of NYC's "regional rags." They'll eventually fall to a 3 day per week format, or something, and essentially sell the local news - competing with the burough and neighborhood rags.
If NYC wasn't so large, they wouldn't make it at all. But they'll make it, in a manner of speaking.
And don't worry about conservatives. To some degree it will be better to see the NYT humbled in perpetuity, than be gone.
Air America was MUCH more fun when it pretended to be a real radio network... ;)
And don't worry about conservatives. To some degree it will be better to see the NYT humbled in perpetuity, than be gone.
I don't want to see it gone, I would rather just see it bought by Rupert Murdoch.
Is Carlos Slim selling?
the gray lady is getting grayer by the minute. The NYT will basically become the largest of NYC's "regional rags." They'll eventually fall to a 3 day per week format
I wish I could believe that but its brand name and editorial board is worth more than that. Someone will scoop it up on the cheap just for those assets.
No doubt this is the case. But are you referring to their subscribers or advertisers? Both are customers. I think the advertiser is the more important "customer" from the standpoint of revenue (IIRC subscription revenue for most newspapers was/is a fairly modest percentage of advertising revenue).
So, this leads me to what I think is the real problem for newspapers -- and one I've never heard an answer for: why is the online readership of newspapers apparently of so little value to advertisers? A lot of these newspapers make the claim -- quite plausibly in my view -- that their total readership (web + print) is greater than ever before. Why is web traffic so hard to monetize?
FWIW, I can understand that one of the main cash cows for newspapers -- classified advertising -- has been decimated by the "free" economy aspects of the web (I'm thinking especially, of course, of Craigslist). But why aren't Apple or Sony or Target or Delta more interested in doing branding via the online products of newspapers? As I mentioned previously, there certainly are a lot of eyeballs up for grabs on the web, and the internet has advantages (greater flexibility, the ability to make your advertising interactive) that print doesn't offer. You would think the former would therefore offer a more compelling value proposition to advertisers than apparently it does.
Anyway, because of all this I conclude that the reality is that even without the internet, there's something intrinsic about newspaper advertising that's not well-suited to modern consumers, and that the internet has merely hastened, not caused, its decline. Indeed, now that I think about it, TV and radio advertising aren't enjoying boom times, either. It seems likely that it is the 20th century notion of advertising itself that is in trouble, and naturally this trouble has played out most vividly and most spectacularly in the weakest and least economically efficient of the media.
Why is web traffic so hard to monetize?
Ad blockers. Sure, not everyone uses them, but the advertisers want proof that Joe Web Surfer actually read the ad, or at least saw it.
I think it goes way beyond this, though. I use Firefox's popup ad blocker myself, but I'm not really bothered by regular old banner ads as they're not "in my face." I can't imagine most people are.
But do you even see them, really? The advertisers want proof that you saw it, via a click through, and that it applies to you. Just having it on the page isn't good enough. If Fairfax Auto Parts runs an ad in the WaPo they can be sure that most of the people who see it are in areas where Fairfax auto Parts operates. Not so with an online ad.
"... advertisers want proof that Joe Web Surfer actually read the ad, or at least saw it."
And with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the advertiser got something approaching that proof.
Web metrics, however, are opaque and easily manipulated.
Advertisers also learned the hard way that many newspaper personnel are fraudsters. ABC circulation numbers were being manipulated by newspaper publishers. Many were caught. Some - such as the Dallas Morning News - even paid millions in restitution to advertisers to avoid fraud charges and arrest.
The lesson they learned is that if you get in bed with liberals, prepare to be fucked.
Newspapers, sadly, can no longer be trusted.
So, they'll die.
The lesson they learned is that if you get in bed with liberals, prepare to be fucked.
WTF are you talking about? We've already been fucked over by six years of Republican rule so what is your point?
Wiredog,
but people skip over the ads in the newspapers all the time too. I think Jasper is right, its not that web ads are so less effective than print ads, its that advertisers are starting to realize that print ads are no great shakes either.
Although one problem with web ads is that print ad audiences are at least localized, which makes them viable to advertising customers who otherwise wouldn't be interested.
...which is funny because what proof do advertisers in print or broadcast have that anyone reads or hears the copy or in the case of TV/Radio, stays on the channel showing the ad.
Advertising plays an important role at the top of the sales funnel, awakening desire and putting the product on the list of brands to consider, but that's about it. All of a sudden with the internet and its ability to produce metrics, marketers are learning that less than 1 percent of consumers will actively engage with an ad, i.e. take the time right now to learn more about the product by clicking over to the website. Stupidly, they blame the internet -- shooting the messenger as it were. The internet has just given them a counting tool they didn't have before. Crazily, they assume the low numbers are a unique phenomenon associated with internet advertising.
If I had something to market, I would buy advertising on the internet in a second. It's way undervalued, and my suspicion is it performs as well as it does in any other medium, which is to say, not all that well, but well enough to justify doing it.
There's a saying that I think is more about PR but applies to advertising as well: Ninety percent of what you spend is wasted. The problem is, you don't know which 90 percent.
I was going to say something in this vein, but you phrased it better than I would have. So I'll just rip a convention off some less-formal boards and say "This".
Why is web traffic so hard to monetize?
Very low barriers to entry means a lot more competition. A computer is much cheaper than a printing press and physical distribution system, and the web scales traffic a lot more easily too.
There is a lot in what you say. Also there is habit.
What I think we are seeing though is that the www advertising is undervalued.
When I ran a small business advertising was a LARGE part of product cost. Maybe 20% to 40%. The www drives that down to 2% to 4%. But advertisers are only willing to pay 1%. That will change.
One of the other things to consider is search engines. You don't need as much advertising when search engines drive traffic to your site.
Yes, very good point. I was thinking about that too. It's much easier to get web traffic than to get people to sign up for your newspaper.
The TV ads are hurt by all the competiton. At one time you only had the 3 networks and some independent stations. Now, you have hundreds of TV channels.
The failure to monetize web ads properly by newspaper sites seems, to me, to be the fault of the papers. Print ads were always priced based on "impressions", tied to circulation, and reader demographics. I have no idea how the papers price their web ads, but it would make sense for them to price them on the same methodology as print - based on the number of eyeballs that see the ad.
And how do you count those eyeballs? And how do you determine if the ad (for, say, a local restaurant) is being seen by local eyeballs?
Depending on how the web server is set up, it records where the hit is coming from. That is how you get localized ads on national sites now. The server also tracks the hits on the page displaying the ad. This is all done now and has been for quite a few ads.
When I used to buy the paper from time to time, I would read the front page, editorials and comics. The rest went straight to the recycling bin. I have a feeling that if even if the newspaper people had known that much about me, their advertising people probably wouldn't have mentioned it when advising Tom's Tree Farm on the value of his ad in the House and Garden section. The real killer for newspapers on the web is that even if you're selling impressions, not clicks, the number of impressions was probably wildly overstated in the pre-web days. The problem with monetizing web content isn't that the web is different; the problem is that it's easier for advertisers to discover that they've been over-paying.
Depending on how the web server is set up, it records where the hit is coming from. That is how you get localized ads on national sites now. The server also tracks the hits on the page displaying the ad. This is all done now and has been for quite a few ads.
OK, that explains how I, here in Texas, can see Whataburger ads when reading Lileks on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune site. I knew that the chain didn't go anywhere near that far north. I figured it was something like Ed described above.
wiredog & TallDave both nail it. Besides, how many people click on an ad? I never do. Not on purpose anyway. Lets face it. The newspapers aren't delivering what readers want. I know some people will laugh and snort, but while Conservatives whine about the "liberal media", liberals and progressives see little value in that same media because of idiots like Fred Hiatt. Who wants to pay for his stupidity(and by extension Donald Graham's and Katharine Weymouth's .. since they hired Hiatt)? Do you really think most liberals/progressives watch MSNBC all day long? Hardly! Most only watch it at night when KO and Maddow are one. Why would liberals want to watch JoeScar?
Because he is on a daily show clip in the process of being mocked.
They most likely didn't work much better than the web ones do in the sense that very few people "clicked on" them. (Say, immediately went out and purchased or chased down more infomration about a product they saw advertised.)
The difference is that with web ads it's very easy to see how ineffective they are, making it very difficult to charge for them.
A similar process is in the earlier stages with television advertising: it's no longer "working" anymore either as DVRs and electronic methods of seeing if people fast-forward through your ads allow advertisers to clearly see for the first time that just about nobody who isn't tied down with Clockwork-Orange style gizmos strapped to his head is watching their crappy ads.
Advertsiers are loathe to pay big bucks for advertising that they can tell is being ignored. The beauty of the old days was that it was nearly impossible to tell what was being ignored.
Also, people shouldn't underestimate the hit newspapers took when classfied ads went the way to Craigslist. That was a huge revenue source that just up and walked off. Not that there weren't better ways the papers could have responded, but still.
Who's to say a newspaper ad "worked?" Who's to say an online ad that no one clicks "didn't work?"
For what it is worth, I don't see web advertisements. They take up space around what I see. I don't see them.
With newspapers, I have two experiences. I read a national paper maybe 2-3 times a week. I read articles and the editorial page and scan through the business section. I never look at ads, don't remember them, don't see them.
With the local papers (in our small town, serving around 20,000 people, there are 4 papers. Three weekly free, one daily for fee), I scan through, looking for any local news, pictures of people to see if I recognize them, obituaries. And I see the ads. I know the people who run the companies, and look at their ads to see what they are up to. I scan through the car sales and real estate to see what things are happening.
The local free with news and sports coverage are doing well.
Derek
"Besides, how many people click on an ad? I never do. Not on purpose anyway."
That depends on what I'm reading. If I'm reading liberal leftist hate speech, then I don't even see the ads. My browser doesn't even display ads from Andrew Sullivan's page for example (I do allow ads to display on Megan's page as a reward).
It's how I reward good writers. And it's how you can punish people like Andrew Sullivan ... by turning off the ads on their page.
Never have readers had such power over the publisher. Can't turn off a newspaper ad, now can you?
I've been known to click on ads before, but not often, and only ever on sites I want to support(if it's a site I dislike, I'll just Google the product instead). I think I even bought something off a web ad once, which puts it one above newspaper ads for me.
Newspaper revenue used to consist of three streams: subscribers, classified ads, and large-font business ads. For most of the 20th century, owning a successful paper was like having a license to print money. The rates for half-page ads at the paper I worked at back in the day would have made you choke, but businesses paid for them because besides radio, newspapers were seen as the most effective way to advertise locally. Jasper is right about the decline of mass-market advertising in general. Maybe there is no such thing as a mass market anymore. Whatever the reasons, there go two of the three revenue streams.
What's really been remarkable, however, is how the industry has voluntarily destroyed the third--subscriptions--by providing its content for free online. I've talked to many former colleagues about this, including several at the Post, and they all say the same thing, that basically they put their papers online for free because...they didn't know what else to do. That began in the mid-1990s. Just today, Howard Kurtz at the Post said that eventually the industry would figure out a way to monetize its web presence. Really? Why? Because, well, it has to? It's been fifteen years, and no answer seems to be forthcoming.
Every now and then the WSJ publishes something saying they were right about their online subscription model (i.e. not free). Maybe the remaining national newspapers will follow their lead.
Is their content as compelling as the WSJ's? Because that is the Journal's advantage: quality reportage that is clearly better than the free alternatives. I pay $40/yr for the NYT's puzzle section, but their news operation isn't worth that to me.
Yeah, for anything other than local news, a paywall isn't going to work, because I can just Google for some other media source that's making it available for free. That includes stuff like BBC (for international news, much better than any US broadcast news source) and NPR (whose whole business model involves giving away the content and asking politely for donations).
For local news, you might manage to restrict it to subscribers. But here, you have (for most places) a rather small audience that's interested. I'm not sure I'd pay much to have online access to local news, especially as any really big stories will also be carried nationally.
I wonder if local news would work better on a donation model, rather like NPR. The information they're producing is important to have and makes the local government work better, but is hard to get paid for. And yet, giving them tax money is likely to amount to a government leash. Donations might be the best of a bad lot of options.
In the web age, is there really much of a difference between subscribing to a newspaper and donating to it?
Web traffic isn't hard to monetize. Legacy newspapers just don't know how to do it — and, apparently, don't want to know how to do it.
There are market forces at play, however. Ad spend continues to move online at a rapid pace, but clearly not fast enough for some newspapers. But the wholesale elimination of the classified advertising marketplace by craigslist is the single most important factor in the demise of legacy newspapers.
This is an important point: while total U.S. advertising spend is currently down because of the recession, it has otherwise been consistently on the increase. But the classified advertising marketplace — which has traditionally been a strong revenue source for local newspapers — no longer exists. craigslist has eliminated this market.
This is particularly ironic for several reasons. First, online classified ad revenue would have helped newspapers preserve some of their revenue during the early days of the online transition (had most journalists and newspaper managers not chosen to put their heads in the ground). There is no fundamental technological or market reason why online classifieds couldn't have been a money-making opportunity for newspapers — except for craigslist. It was craigslist's first-mover advantage, coupled with their ideological decision to make online classified advertising free that killed the classified advertising marketplace.
This is the most ironic aspect of the whole situation. By and large, the same people who are so distraught at the demise of legacy newspapers and the perceived loss of liberal editorial boards are the same people who celebrate craigslist's anti-profit "let the Internet be free" philosophy.
They still can. Craigslist will eventually be killed by some freeloading viral garbage, just like direct e-mail was killed by spam, simply because it's free. Being free means there are no resources to defend it against viral exploitation, only stopgap slowing solutions like CAPTCHA and community-monitoring "flagging."
The winner here will be the one who figures out that people will pay for the guarantee of high quality advertising, meaning vetted, reliable, timely, and excellently indexed and searchable. But they're not likely to want to pay up front, in a subscription or search fee. If they don't find what they want, that feels like wasted money.
But they're probably more than willing to pay at the time of purchase, folded into the purchase price. I think this may already exist, and be called eBay. Still, there's no reason someone can't start up a regional eBay, maybe.
By and large, the same people who are so distraught at the demise of legacy newspapers and the perceived loss of liberal editorial boards are the same people who celebrate craigslist's anti-profit "let the Internet be free" philosophy.
I'm not sure if I've seen that. Those saying "let the Internet be free" tend, more often than not, to be techo-libertarian rather than standard issue progressive. They tend to put more value on technological innovation, or at least the liberty needed to support technological innovation, than progressives do.
The advertising problem is one of supply and demand. The ease of creating a Web site and the proliferation of advertising networks has created near limitless supply of ad impressions. Advertisers, believing that it doesn't matter how they reach their target demographic, buy that demographic on ad networks instead of buying impressions on specific online publications. If the advertiser doesn't care if she reaches her target demo through a part-time mommy blogger or through newyorktimes.com, all ad cpms will be pushed lower.
Also, because metrics are so easy to track online, online display advertising has always been seen as a direct response vehicle. But what is the point of paying for clicks on a branding campaign? Nonetheless, advertisers run branding campaigns online and then lament the ineffectiveness of online advertising when click through rates are low, and demand lower cpms. Or else they threaten to go run those branding campaigns offline where, paradoxically, the tracking of metrics is even more hocus pocus.
Jasper, I think you're right, but I think the problem with the newspaper model is in the assumption that people want two very separate functions -- reading about the news, and shopping -- to be combined in one vehicle, and indulged in simultaneously.
I don't think they do. If you want to read about the world, you do, and advertising is so annoying you go to some length -- Adblockers, cable TV, Sirius/XM radio -- to tune it out. If you're shopping, then you go to product review sites (which are doing very well) or to Amazon.com and read customer reviews (which are booming), or to the manufacturer/provider's own website.
It's not that people want either less news o' the world or less information about products and services. They just don't want them combined so they're forced to read and shop at the same time.
I think the essential problem for the newspapers, and for journalists in general, is that they are at the end of a long bubble. People never really did want as much news as your average daily provided. They just wanted the front page, the sports, and the comics. There were niche constituencies for most other functions, and much of the paper went along for the ride on the strength of advertisements. But now that people can separate their shopping from their news gathering, well, the truth is, they just don't want that much of the former. So the industry is going to have to contract. A lot.
McArdle is wrong that the fact that there are more old-timers in the center than jobs means newcomers won't get jobs. Hardly. In fact, the opposite is more likely. In a severely contracting industry, you are more likely to lay off or fire the expensive oldsters with their senior-level salaries and generous benefits left over from the Good Old Days, and replace them with hungry kids to whom you can pay peanuts and zero benefits. I think McArdle is just indulging in wishful thinking because she and her friends are inside the magic circle, and all the lean and hungry faces looking in make her nervous. As they should.
Wow.
Brings to mind what someone said about the Internet a few years ago, something along the lines of -- "Just imagine if someone had told you in the 1980s that soon there would be billions of pages of content online, mostly created for free. They'd have said you were crazy."
Just imagine if someone told you in the 1980s that the Russian Mafia was using chinese computers to send her images of japanese lesbian schoolgirl sex via lasers and she COULDN'T GET THEM TO STOP.
Now THAT'S crazy.
Congrats, you have now just won the thread. Or perhaps the whole Internets.
In what is surely unrelated news my brief sampling of the websites for cnn, foxnews, and msnbc none had a stand-alone science section.
cnn: literally nothing. They have health & technology as stand-alone sections and no science section.
foxnews: scitech.
msnbc: Tech & science.
Utterly shameful especially cnn.
Although for most people technology (applied science) is more relevant than basic science. The usual alternative to no science section is a science section that pretends that a small marginal breakthrough means instant cancer cure tomorrow.
If I click my heels three times while saying I want better science coverage will you be wrong?
Answer: no.
Will it make any difference?
Answer: hmmm.
CNN and MSNBC are too busy interviewing the liar who called a fake press conference and misrepresented himself as the Chamber Of Commerce spokesman.
He announced that the Chamber had flipped a 180 on Cap And Tax and was now in favor of it.
The actual CoC rep got up and said "this presser is a fake" and the so-called "news" reporters told him to shut up so they could listen to the liar/fake.
The liar/fake is now a regular contributor to CNN and MSNBC.
They were taken for a ride by BubbleBoy and liked it.
And the Fourth Estate wonders why I have so little respect for them.
Too good to check.
To be fair, it's a pretty niche variety of news, and not something that lends itself to up-to-the-minute reporting. You go to magazines for that stuff, not newspapers or TV stations.
Anyway, because of all this I conclude that the reality is that even without the internet, there's something intrinsic about newspaper advertising that's not well-suited to modern consumers
I wonder if the internet isn't responsible for that reduced value.
In high school, when I bought a Karmann Ghia and wanted parts for it, I bought a copy of "Hot VWs and Dune Buggies" at the newsstand. I didn't particularly care about the articles (which were utter fluff), and I never bought more than one copy (which I still have, it turns out). I bought it specifically for the ads. That's how you found suppliers for your hobby less than 2 decades ago. But why would I bother with that today?
Similarly, I wonder if things like online product reviews haven't diminished the effectiveness of advertising more generally. You can fire up your search engine and find out what 1000 people think about this or that product, or you can go to one of the innumerable forums run by vBulletin and discover that yes, there really are people who hang out all day and discuss the merits of various dishwashers. So the Sunday supplement is less relevant to your shopping.
And of course, having figured out exactly what you want to buy, you can go to the websites of retailers and manufacturers to find out if/when a sale is coming, diminishing the value of the glossy parts of the newspaper even more.
That reminds me of the Computer Shopper. There was no other way to compare prices for cheap made-in-Taiwan PC clones and that 2400 baud modem you'd been saving up for. It was expensive, too. Must have made a mint in its heyday.
Computer Shopper was absolutely killed by the internet. As was the computer show and the computer vendors at hamfests; IME. Ziff-Davis bought a dead mag walking and tried to use it as part of a market-segmenting strategy. Didn't work.
(I miss trolling hte aisles at hamfests and computer shows looking for parts to build my blazing-fast gaming rig... But not enough to do it again)
"we're eventually going to end up with a few national papers, a la Britain, rather than local dailies. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times (sorry, conservatives!) are weathering the downturn better than most, and it's not surprising: business, politics, and national upper-middlebrow culture. But in 25 years, will any of them still be printing their product on the pulped up remains of dead trees? It doesn't seem all that likely."
I'm a bit confused. Are you predicting that we will have only a few national papers within 25 years, or are you predicting that (a) soon there will be only a few national papers, but (b) after another 25 years or so, even the nationals will disappear (I'm assuming you cited the WSJ, NY Times, and Post as examples of national papers, but if not, maybe that's where I got confused)? If you are predicting that even national papers will go the way of the dodo after 25 years or so, do you mean they won't exist period, or they simply won't exist in print version?
It seems to me that there will have to be some kind of national news apparatus (either national papers, or AP type organizations that sell their stories to websites), although I could see them existing on the internet only and no longer being in print, or the traditional national organizations (AP, WSJ, etc) being taken over by online or television content (MSNBC, CNN, etc).
And will magazines (e.g., the Atlantic) go the same way as the newspapers?
My interpretation was that soon there will only be a few national dailies. And within 25 years even they will be only available on-line or on something like a kindle/i-kindle.
There's probably room for a few national news organizations (not necessarily paper-based). The regional mono-dailies like the SF Chronic, Indianapolis Star, Dallas Morning News, et al are probably doomed. To a large extent they just reprint national news content from the AP or the big national news organizations. Why not cut out the middle man?
There's probably room for very local papers like those free weekly tabloids.
Maybe the national news organization will cluster around TV/cable rather than print. The cable news types seem to still have a viable business model. They're largely parasitic off of what's being pushed by AP or the NYT or WaPo, but if those organizations go down they could develop there own reporting talent.
I kinda suspect the "national magazine think piece" writers will gravitate to academia or think tanks. It's considered a bit gauche now, but what if someone set up an aggregation blog for academic econ types writing for the general public?
Jasper has hit upon the real problem -- the entire premise of advertising has been thrown on its head. A newspaper's (or TV station's) business model is really very simple: It sells readers to advertisers. In most studies, newspaper advertising is considered the least obtrusive compared to ads in other media. Readers expect it. Some even buy the paper to get it (Sunday inserts and coupons). When is the last time you heard of someone going to a web site to see the pop-up ads? The Internet will not kill newspapers any more than TV killed newspapers. What all media have to fear is the loss of faith in the power of mass-market advertising.
I don't think it's a coincidence that in the one medium where you can really measure response, the direct effects of advertisements are really limited.
Megan:
Circulation figures only tell part of the story, In fact, from what I understand circulation *revenue* has actually increased at many of the listed papers. From the E&P story:
"There are several reasons as to why circulation keeps dropping, aside from former readers who have kicked the print edition to the curb. Publishers have been purposely pulling back on certain types of circulation, including hotel, employee and third-party sponsored copies. No longer are they distributing newspapers to the outer reaches of the core market. The cost of delivery and the cost of materials have forced publishers to scale back.
Another shift has occurred: volume has taken a back seat to dollars.
Several major newspapers across the country have aggressively hiked prices of single-copy and home-delivered papers in search of circulation revenue and a renewed focus on loyal readers. Circulation is guaranteed to go down as prices go up, but publishers have opted to wring more revenue from readers as advertisers keep their coffers closed.
Several newspaper companies reported their circulation revenue is on the rise. In Q3, circulation revenue grew 6.7% at McClatchy, 11% at Media General, and 6.7% at The New York Times Co.
A.H. Belo raised home-delivered subscription prices from $21 to $30 on May 1 at its flagship. Daily circulation at The Dallas Morning News dropped 20.8% and 15.5% on Sunday but executives attributed about 40% of home-delivered loss to the price rate increase. The company also trimmed back circulation in other areas as well."
There's one big follow-up question that needs to be asked though - how many of the people willing to pay jacked-up prices for daily newspaper delivery are going to be dead in the next 20 years? The demographics do not favour this strategy in the long term.
Maybe the "know nothing" party will appear on the scene again, since we "only know what we read in the newspaper".
Or perhaps this is the payback for the newspapers telling everyone how good the economy was doing and how much their house was going to go up ... right up until the day of economic doom ... when even John McCain stopped saying "the fundamentals of the economy are sound".
The newspapers won't tell us stories like the bailout debate in Kuwait, because they think we require pabulum instead of a gaze in the real daily mirror which shows a Halloween character in there.
The daily mirror went away on its own, and so it is fitting that they throw the paper and ink in the trash too, where pop journalism took itself long ago.
I think you'll find that the reason stories like that don't get reported is that most people care less about them than about the latest cat rescued from a tree three blocks from them.
For circulation revenue, the answer for the news industry is 'Kindle it' - as soon as there is an industry standard for paid electronic transmission to readers. (I guess that will turn out to be a very smart phone too.)
For advertising revenue, you have got to sell responses and target readers; not just massive reader numbers. We have been edging towards selling both responses and target readers reached in the print media for years. Newspaper and magazine mangements now have to see that as their core business model for advertising revenue - and it makes little difference whether they Kindle or paper it.
I wouldn't worry about journalists and newspapers. Some of them are already looking to extract rents via taxes on other media.
What has happened here (Ann Arbor) is the local daily recently shut down, put its building up for sale, laid off most of the staff, and morphed into a smaller, mostly online operation (with a 2 or 3 print editions a week) that focuses exclusively on local issues -- no national wire-service stories at all. Which is logical -- why would I want to get national news that way? It's too early to tell if this model will work financially where the old one was failing, but it makes a lot more sense.
The useful value added on national stories would involve reporting on the impact of some national story on your local market. But I wonder how much interest there is in this--as a society, we've shifted more and more control away from local people and toward central authorities. The federal government, the national media, and big companies in retail and banking have a huge impact on our lives. How much does it make sense for me to pay attention to my local government and the local scene, especially if I see myself as living here until the next job change, when I'll uproot my family and go wherever the next gig is?
Maybe if they stopped calling them News-papers,
and started calling them Advertising-papers ? :)
A 21st century print media publisher, trying to offer
more value to its customers than its Web-based competition;
Contradiction in terms, or recipe for success ?
How to deliver a physical object to a reader, which is
less expensive, or more valuable, than Web content ?
As Julius Caesar said: Veni, Widi, V\_ici; If the economy
goes down and stays down, the market may return to a '50s model,
with customers who can afford a newspaper, but not a computer.
On a more optimistic note, if there were a periodical which
contained the Best of the Web, fact checked, cross referenced,
with (real, unbiased) expert commentary, I would buy it for $10,
particularly if it included content customized to my interests.
f there were a periodical which contained the Best of the Web, fact checked, cross referenced, with (real, unbiased) expert commentary, I would buy it for $10, particularly if it included content customized to my interests
Much likelier to be an online product. I wouldn't be surprised if there already is one. And if not... [on the phone to the friendly neighborhood VC]
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
They carry "The Best of the Web" almost every week day. It's even free.
There is no conceivable economic downturn that takes the computer out of the average living room that does not involve nuclear bombs or a meteor.
A repeat of the 1859 Solar flares would. For a few years anyway.
Strange I haven't seen any SF based on that, because it was in 1859, there are heaps of records about it.
Here you go. The science is terrible, but its an example.
http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Flare-Novel-Larry-Burkett/dp/1881273075
While I don't necessarily disagree with the concerns raised in this article, there are many competing theories regarding how all of this plays out. My view is similar to the author's regarding national papers being the winners in the end. However, an article in Barron's this weekend took the opposing view and argued that locals have higher margins and may be better positioned. I found that quite odd and wrote an article on my blog: http://www.rationalwalk.com/?p=2986
Ultimately, the papers that will succeed will be those that somehow combine the established brand they have built on newsprint with value added features available online. The WSJ, FT, and The Economist have all done this very well. Local papers have had a harder time. I can't even think of any local papers that charge for online content. WSJ, FT, and Economist all have some charging schemes in place.
For the good of society, newspapers need to find an economic model that works. Blogs and other sources are interesting and often provide good information, but there is tons of noise out there as well. We need newspapers more than ever. What we don't need is government bailing out papers. This will destroy the free press in our society. I'd rather see many major papers fail than have the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barney Frank injecting politics into our papers (and yes, some on the right will try to do the same when they get back into power).
We don't need newspapers. We don't need journalists. We need fierce citizens calling for attention to problems, and they are doing just that on the web.
The National/International papers have defensible value propositions - breaking news that is financially important to people, truly penetrating analysis, positional status. FT, WSJ, Bloomberg all have this, as do Aviation Week and Roll Call. Local papers are the only people interested in local events and don't have to be rigorous in ensuring that they only have local readers: the only people who read the sites are by definition deeply interested in a certain location, whether as frequent visitors or locals, so they are valuable to local businesses. My reading of the WSJ or Times of London is valuable to global brands but not to the local car repair guy (I'm aware that it's not a perfect analogy given the advertising profile, but I so rarely see a local copy of the papers I can't give an apposite example).
A major issue on the lack of online spend is that the final buyers haven't really committed to digital. They don't see it as real, many barely engage online, and they don't see that their target market lives online and really can be reached through digital display/brand building as well as transactional advertising. Companies engaged in online retail have bought in (see Amazon's blogs) as have trial lawyers (see the costs of asbestos related ad words) and pharma. But the big accounts are still run by those who share Anna Wintour's approach to digital.
How come nobody yet said "This will be the death of investigating journalism"?
This will be the death of investigating journalism.
Perhaps because investigative journalism died with the election of Barack Hussein Obama mmm....mmmm...mmmmm
True, the Internet killed "investigating journalism"...
By exposing how biased such "investigations" were....if not outright lies (see Rather, Dan).
This will be the death of investigat[ive] journalism.
No, it will just mean that investigations will be carried out on a shoestring by political partisans like O'Keefe and Giles, or at great expense by partisan think tanks and lobbies.
I'd like to mourn that as tragic, but given how often "investigative journalism" is borderline yellow journalism to begin with, I'm not sure there's as much to mourn as would be ideal.
And there, yet again, is the internet playing a role: where we might once have received the wisdom of the investigators unquestioned, now there are a million small-time experts of varying credibility ready to shred whatever comes out, and indeed to investigate journalism and expose its weaknesses.
Two great points made by Rob Lyman. First: "In high school, when I bought a Karmann Ghia and wanted parts for it, I bought a copy of 'Hot VWs and Dune Buggies' at the newsstand... I bought it specifically for the ads. That's how you found suppliers for your hobby less than 2 decades ago. But why would I bother with that today?" Exactly, and ditto if you were into cooking, playing guitar, or whatever way back when. The ads were valuable back then, to get an idea of the latest and the greatest. The ads were part of the fun! Now we just jump on the internet and go to sites devoted to these various pursuits. And second: "...investigations will be carried out on a shoestring by political partisans like O'Keefe and Giles, or at great expense by partisan think tanks and lobbies." Right, and I agree that this is not necessarily something to mourn. Compare the "investigative" debacle that got Dan Rather fired to what O'Keefe and Giles pulled off (even as the "real" media scoffed at Acorn's critics). Well, there you go.
Partisan journalism is fine by me. As long as there are a couple of conditions:
1. Partisans on both sides. Or rather all sides. At least 5 to 7 sides for preference.
2. Meta-investigators who will fact check the original stories mercilessly.
So far so good.
5-7 websites per ideology? I dunno man, I'm not sure that the internet can deliver that much content.
Sorry, misread you. That should say "5-7 different ideologies with a website delivering partisan analysis?"
5 to 7 ideologies
Say, (in the USA) Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, Socialist, Conservative.
YOu can probably come up with a lot more in a minutes thought.
Feminist, Male-ist, Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Muslim (probably several types here alone), Chinese Diaspora, PRC, Japanese, Technophile, Luddite, ....
There are probably dozens of different cohesive groups that can investigate and push their own agendas.
The New York Times can easily be saved and even grow significantly. They just have to change the paper's name to something more reflective of their content and editorial slant.
The name "The Onion" comes to mind.
Faux News should be renamed "Fiction News" or "Yellow News" or "News not fit for human consumption"!
To be fair, if this news source's name can be taken literally, "Fiction News" would seem to be a perfectly apt translation. I see no need for a name change - it's like Pravda, we don't need it translated into English for us to know that everything that appears in it is truth.
And yet people can change the channel. Why don't they? Why is CNN falling like a rock and Fox is holding its own?
It's not like there aren't alternatives. Is it that people don't know they are being conned?
And how did that Air America thing work out for you? Well I guess it got Franken elected once the right (left?) votes had been found. So there is that.
Imagine explaining newspapers to your grandchildren.
Kid: Grammpy, what are newspapers.
Grammpy: Oh sonny, it was like they printed out internet and delivered it to your house.
Kid: Huh.... I can't imagine why that didn't work out long term.
"Web traffic isn't hard to monetize. "
Tell that to the music industry. Newspapers troubles have nothing to do with left or right , or even their content at all, really. It's just the same technological shift that hit the music business, what used to cost is now available free. The next industry after newspapers will be books as younger people start to use Kindles etc , and figure out how to bootleg the downloads. Does anyone really think that folks under 30 will pay for a book when they don't have to?
"Does anyone really think that folks under 30 will pay for a book when they don't have to?"
They've already stopped paying. In my mid-30's here. But I took a college course last year. When I mentioned in class that I bought the text book at the bookstore (full price!), one student laughed at me and another told me in all seriousness about 3 websites where I could rip the book for free.
Yeah? Then what? You're going to print it out on your own color laser printer? That'll save money, ha ha. Or are you going to carry your laptop around with you and squint at the JPGs? This is one of those seemed like a good idea at the time non-good ideas.
I don't doubt that college students do rip textbooks, but part of that is sheer antiestablishmentarianism, the purview of college students since Cicero, I doubt not, and part is that textbooks in particular because of the peculiar separation between "buyer" (professor) and "payor" (student) have obscene pricing levels, far above the natural market price, and it grates on them.
The real money-loser for textbook publishers is simply the used-book market. And the real killer ap is the online textbook, or even online course.
But I don't think this applies to the cut-throat business of regular book publishing.
Yes , they will carry around their Kindle or laptop or whatever new device it is and squint at the screen because it will be free, exactly. Free will beat anything in the end.
"Then what? You're going to print it out on your own color laser printer?"
I didn't do it. But the students did. And do you know what they did? They saved a pdf, emailed it to work, and printed it out on their employer's dime (which sometimes was the school). Others just followed along on their laptops to the ripped textbooks (it's easier to type notes with 2 hands than write with 1).
Why would it ever need to hit dead tree? You keep it in electronic format, and take notes in a program designed for the purpose.
I pay for books all the time. Given a few thousand spare dollars, I'd gladly walk into a Chapters with a shopping cart. Then again, I'm a freak. And even then, I prefer e-books to paper - I'm at my computer more, and I find it way easier to get into a comfortable reading position with my computer than with an actual physical book.
I doubt that the newspaper business is in a death spiral. Newspaper circulation always falls in a recession, because canceling the daily paper is an easy way to economize. Many go to a four day per week plan. Newsies may not agree, but local sports and obituaries will always sell papers, and papers don't require user inputs. For far too many people, the inexpensive computer bought for Christmas is clogged beyond functioning in a matter of months or only used to play Solitaire. It is not delivering the news. Television news has changed in that people talk faster and louder, but that will not do-in the papers.
Pablo,
but local sports and obituaries will always sell papers
How old are you?
Old enough to need a Mac, but not so old as to go to church regularly. Studies have shown which parts of newspapers are turned to first or most read, and to my recollection sports and obituaries win. Legal notices also contribute to continued profitability.
Legal notices also contribute to continued profitability.
So that revenue stream lasts until 3 seconds after a legislative change...
The fate of the papers in Britain was sealed when it became illegal to wrap Fish & Chips in them.
Ugh. I actually remember that. Not in Britain, but in British Columbia.
And yes, I read the obituaries.
Derek
I believe the last time I remember buying fish and chips it was still wrapped in newspaper.
Mind you, that was a long time ago.
Information and analysis are still valuable. People will pay for original/exclusive sources of information as proven by the Wall Street Journal. Printed text on paper? Not so valuable. I wouldn't be surprised to see everything go "online."
There isn't much profit in non-exclusive content, so I can see that basically staying free as long as people are free. The only value to be made there is aggregating and sorting it and putting a few ads up to pay for it. Might be a good job for an editor, but not too much room for highly paid reporters. If "professional" newspapers want to stay in business they need paid subscribers, not advertisers.
Newspapers are obsolete and no one should mourn their passing (other than former employees). The internet is a vastly superior way to get information, both a wider variety and more in depth coverage. Twenty years from now there will definitely be fewer reporters doing better coverage than exists now. Thats called efficency, its the creative destruction that most sectors of the economy have to deal with.
I took a newspaper for thirty years. They drove me away.
If newspapers don't want me as a customer, I can take the hint.
Cancellation was easy.
Now that they are so fully in the tank for Dear Leader -- asking no hard questions of the naked emperor for fear of be Foxed -- I have absolutely no respect for them.
"What has enchanted you...?" Yeech.
So newspapers can't stay alive on content alone. Gots to have the ads.
Does this death spiral mean it never was about content?
That no matter how many Pulizers, no matter how many scoops, it was always about the Macy's ads?
That's rich.
So ultimately, there's no difference between the New York Times and the Pennysaver.
In the immortal word of Glenn Reynolds, "Heh."
"[t]here's no difference between the New York Times and the Pennysaver"
No. There's not a difference. Times readers are after content, which takes the form of news. Pennysaver readers are after content, which takes the form of ads. And both relied on revenue models (the Times on ads and subscriptions and the Pennysaver on ads) which don't work anymore for the respective publications.
If journalists wrote something worth reading, they might do better.
The papers threw in with the soap opera women market, which it turns out is not big enough to support the news business.
For the rest of us, revulsion is the result, and now we have other choices.
Heck, even the sportswriters have turned against half (or more) of their audience.
Conservatives need not apply.
"Grammpy: Oh sonny, it was like they printed out internet and delivered it to your house."
Hmmm. Actually, maybe that could be a viable business model. Check out InstaPaper. http://blog.instapaper.com/ This app allows you to select web pages to be reformatted into text to be read later on your computer or iphone.
The developer is also working on a way to deliver web pages to your eReader. And he also is working on a way for you to print out the web pages you select to a printer at home.
So why couldn't some paper develop a model which would do the same thing, delivered to your door once a day? The webpaper.
I read through this entire collection of comments without seeing any ads. I realize that information wants to be free, but why not back it with ads? It seems like newspapers and magazines are neglecting to take advantage of the necessary opportunities to generate revenue and sustain their business model.
We should license investigate reporters and not a single one should be granted to Faux News.
Are you drunk commenting again?
We should license investigate reporters...
Now that's funny! What a maroon. I agree with redfly below. Got to be the vodka typing.
Look you goofball, Obama is licensing reporters now. What more could you want than your Dear Leader dictating which news agencies are to be considered legitimate?
Hugo Chavez is giddy.
If newspapers do go away, I'll actually miss a couple of things about them:
1) The comics page. I'm almost certain that every strip I read has a website now, but it's a lot more efficient to read them on three pages of paper than to call up 30-something websites each day.
2) The portability angle. I don't want to take my laptop to lunch (especially since the battery died and I have to plug it in whenever I use it), and I sure as hell will not take it into the bathroom!
3) Hmm, there's bound to be a 3), but I can't think of it right now.
1) There's plenty of sites that aggregate comics, even before you consider RSS readers. I tend to visit my comics site-by-site, but that's largely because a lot of my favourite comics(Penny Arcade and xkcd, most obviously) have additional content that couldn't be put into a Comics section.
2) Agreed. If a Kindle-type device could get more practical for newspapers, though, that may change.
3) I'm not so sure about this one.
1) Even with RSS feeds and aggregation sites it's still not as pleasant to read comics and small type from the sports pages (and probably obits to) online. Scanning your eyes beats clicking and scrolling.
2) Laptops also fail on buses, subways or trains if its crowded.
The death-spiral, which at one time I thought was just wishful thinking, seems to have accelerated in recent weeks.
First off, the mechanics of the system are failing. Delivery to subscribers is becoming non-functional. Perhaps it's "lowest bidder" syndrome; but how long can subscribers be expected to pay to find their papers sitting in a puddle in the street, or to pay for papers they don't receive at all?
And content is plummeting at a catastrophic rate. The decline of the NYTimes over just the past few weeks has been shocking. The front pages have been little more than fluff. I strongly suspect that the Times must continue to ignore stories it's already been ignoring. And those are any which seem to portend disaster for Golden Boy Obama - that is, just about all of them.
I despised my local newspaper's editorial page and their crazy expensive ad rates so I'm a bit gleeful about their current pain.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned how the demise of newspapers is GREAT for the environment. Newpapers are a HUGE source of solid waste. Mother earth is smiling as newspapers fail.
Save the planet. Cancel the newspaper.
Solid waste? For one, newspapers usually get recycled. For two, solid waste is probably the single dumbest "environmental" issue going. We dig a hole, throw stuff in, and cover it over. There is no conceivable relevant upper limit to our ability to do this.
Recycling costs cities money despite what the newspapers tell you and to a degree recycling programs are a government subsidy to newspapers.
Newspapers love recycling and environmental programs because those programs mitigate, at public expense, the huge waste problems newspapers generate.
Don't think of it as 'solid waste'.
Think of it as 'carbon sequestration'.
@ Tom Swift (Sr. or Jr. ? :)__NY Times decline
If they are going out of business anyway, why not
go out with a Bang: Print an entire issue of truthful
reporting and analysis on the Obama Administration;
could be the start of a beautiful friendship with
a whole new readership.
Newspapers are either vanity projects for their owners or a useful conduit for in-kind campaign contributions. Kaplan Inc will keep the money-losing Washington Post and its affiliated money-losing echo chamber apparatus (Newsweek, Slate, etc) running only so long as it needs to keep the college test prep industry unregulated and free of any consumer-protection oversight. Others will go to private ownership, see for example, the Anschutz Company's purchase of the Examiner chain. From what I understand, the free give away papers like the Washington Examiner are doing very well financially because of controlled production costs.
In the small town I am from, the daily newspaper spoke against the Trans Texas Corridor which globalist want to link Mexico, US and Canada, spoke against Rudy Guiliano's law firm which has been busily robbing Texans of their land using the new eminent domain laws and criticized our traitorous, bought-off, whorish, so-called representatives who continually stab is in the back.
So Macquarie Corporation, a globalist corporation, purchased that newspaper and many other small town Texas papers to shut them up and cut off all information on this subject (and others). So the elite now control what is said in these newspapers, they lie by omission. Now, no one wants to purchase these policitally correct, First Amendment busting rags.
Therefore, the fall of so many newspapers.
So you're saying:
1. Start a newspaper
2. Give it away free so to get circulation numbers up.
3. Print loads of articles criticizing "globalist" powers that be (that's a new word for me by the way, what does it mean exactly?)
4. Sell out
5. Profit!
Anyone want to back me in a new business venture?
"The median decline is well into the teens."
Well, there's an easy fact to check... but no, the median decline is actually 11.61%. "Such is blogging," I suppose.
Hagios and others have commented that papers like the NY Times have "valuable" assets that are worth something. Maybe or maybe not. But Warren Buffett was asked recently what he thought of the newsprint media as an investment class. His response was a very terse one. "They are NOT a value at ANY price". Wow. Never one to mince words the Oracle of Omaha just sent a shiver down the spine of Carlos Slim. As for my opinion the NY Times and Washington Post will both file for bankruptcy BEFORE the next Presidential election (sorry liberals, including you Meghan). All I can say is good riddance. In fact if I were a billionaire living in NYC I would spend my entire day handing out dollar bills to people asking them NOT to buy the NYT. That would be a good example of philanthropy at its best. The newspapers are like a dog with rabies. They need to be put out of their misery.
Could it be remotely possible the demise of newspapers has little to do with paper to electronic, as in Internet conversion, and really about the decline of independent, critical and objective reporting?
Remember when the media reported the news instead of trying to make news?
Remember when media outlets had actual international news bureau locations which understood local in country politics and issues instead of relying on Associated Press for every story?
Remember when the difference between "real news" to political commentary was understood and the difference clearly labeled and kept in perspective?
Remember how the media and newspapers worked before control was consolidated into a handful of multi-national corporations such as GE, Viacom, Disney and Ruppert Murdoch's News Corporation with specific agendas which rewrote the rules of what is and what is not news?
Put another way, could it just simply be its not the media communication form driving the business but rather the demise of objective and critical reporting?