There’s an informative piece on the infighting at the New York Times by Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair. I think it’s indicative of the end of journalism as we’ve known it which was at least aspirationally impartial even if its impartiality was honored more in the breach than the observance. I think what we’ll see is increased partisan cheerleading masquerading as impartiality until our news media more closely resemble the situation that prevails in the UK where there’s a Labour daily and a Tory daily.
Contrary to what you might believe, the issue is not the editorial page. It’s the news pages.
A theme I have repeated many times is that newspapers are changing because their business models are changing.
Before the internet; most newspapers in the US were local monopolies / duopoly on news in a text format. Newspapers monetized their monopoly via advertising. The profit incentive was for newspapers to get as many eyes reading; being impartial helped as it was more important to get a breadth of readers then having devoted fans.
Now newspapers live in a nationalized environment with a high amount of competition. Facebook / Google / Amazon dominate the advertising market so monetization is via subscriptions. The changed incentives mean a large readership is not as valuable as a devoted readership willing to pay. Devoted readership could be because its the only source of specialized information (Wall Street Journal and financial news), or devoted because of its partisan lean, etc.
I would note that due to the small geographic size of the UK, they reached a nationalized newspaper business environment decades ago. i.e. how many people realize the Guardian was originally the Manchester Guardian.
Small, independent local weeklies and even some small dailies are doing just fine. The organizations suffering most from online are the large, highly leveraged conglomerates. They’re getting killed by the debt service and because they’ve lost sight of what business they’re in.
@Dave, my understanding is that a lot of the alt-weeklies are suffering and many have closed because they were too dependent on the more risque advertising niche that has migrated on-line in one form or another. This has not been true locally, but we have long been a virtuous city.
My understanding is that core straight news outfits are doing well – like Reuters and the Associated Press. There are also the agencies with the least political bias in their news coverage.
I disagree the Associated Press is thriving (https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2017/newspaper-decline-continues-to-weigh-on-ap-earnings). AP is a non-profit whose revenue comes from its member newspapers, the ills of its customer will effect it.
What’s interesting is the news industry is going from local to national to all English speaking countries. The Guardian had its ill fated venture in the US, but the Daily Mail seems to have a big piece of the “blue collar†news market.
Local vs regional or national media are totally different animals serving totally different consumer interests and with totally different dynamics.
In mid-Michigan you can pick up the Nowhere Gazzette and learn about the fracas over whether to replace a stop sign with a light, who won the Asparagus Queen crown, and of course the local obits. The NYTimes? Not so much.
As for debt. It reminds me of our sign company years ago that had lost some bids, poorly bid some big jobs and had cost overruns. Sales and operating profits lagged. Our illustrious CFO, however, informed us everything would be just fine if we didn’t have that damned interest. Face in palms…..
And when newspaper conglomerates buy local newspapers, stop publishing local news in favor of the boilerplate stuff they’re publishing everywhere, how surprised should we be that they’re not successful? Add to that the leveraging process by which they’re burdening the papers with the debt incurred in buying them, thereby raising their cost basis, and you’ve got a formula for newspaper decline. Newspapers were declining long before the Internet arrived and one of the major culprits is newspaper conglomerates.
That’s very much what I mean by “knowing what business you’re in”. Local newspapers are in the business of selling local advertising and printing local stories. If you want to print national and international stories and pitch political and ideological messages, stay out of local markets.