Signs of the Times (Updated)

This morning I’d like to draw your attention to a post from Kenneth Anderson (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds). In his post Ken expands on a post he wrote for Pajamas Media to weave together the decline in the fortunes of the New York Times, the problems with the business model for print journalism, and Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. The post is the first part and introduction to what is apparently conceived of as a four part series. I won’t attempt to summarize or excerpt it for you except to say that I thought it was of surpassing excellence and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

There is one, small take-away point from the post that I wanted to highlight, since it affirms a point that I’ve made here from time to time, namely, that some of the problems that newspapers are having are due less to fundamental problems with their business model than with unrealistic expectations of the revenue that could be expected under the business model:

The Times’s many enemies should give up the fantasy that it is somehow about to go under; it’s not. It has many problems, starting with Pinch Sulzberger deciding to break the unwritten pact of family-controlled-but-publicly-traded newspapers, viz., that the family would use its control only for editorial content, not to enrich itself at public shareholder expense. The rapacious Sulzberger family has been willing to keep Pinch in power provided that he continue paying out completely unsustainable dividends, at the expense of share price and value; well, even the dividend has finally been slashed.

BTW I don’t think that newspapers are alone in having this problem. I think that many American industries will find that this is the case over the next few years.

Ken Anderson’s Law of War and Just War Theory Blog has been a regular read of mine for years. On the basis of this post I’m adding it to my blogroll, the highest honor I can bestow.

Update

All four parts of the essay are on Ken’s blog.

Part I—Introduction
Part II
Part III
Part IV—Conclusion

The remainder has lived up to the promise of the introduction: it’s absolutely top hole. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve read on a blog.

9 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    I like Ken Anderson’s blog a lot, and have been disappointed that he is not writing as regularly and has not addressed the issue of proportionality that has been raised again. But looking back at his writing on the last Lebanese conflict, nothing new probably needs to have been written.

  • PD Shaw Link

    BTW/ Dave, Anderson’s four parts are all on-line now at least, but they are in reverse blog order in case you missed that.

  • Thanks. I’d missed that.

  • That’s an excellent piece and a banquet for thought. I wish he had left out the snark. It adds nothing and it chases off readers who might otherwise learn something if they weren’t required to argue with the author. But that’s blogs, I guess. I wish he wrote with your tone.

    The ideas that ought to be hammered home are 1. Facts are expensive; opinions are cheap (free). 2. Blogs annotate the media; they don’t replace it. 3. Newspapers (and network media) as “bias-confirmation coccoons.”

    His piece focuses on the NYT (with comparisons to WaPo and WSJ). He says little about the rest of the media, which work off a slightly different model.

    But I think a key there is that all newspapers emulate the New York Times. When my boss discovers that his front page looks the same as the Times’ (or the Post’s) from that day, he’s proud of himself. We not only buy its articles, via its news service, we emulate its style.

    I think there are points to argue with Anderson’s model of what has happened. It’s always a red flag when such a sweeping view gets no further into the history of the profession than 1980 or so.

    I think the “bias-confirmation coccoons” are in part market-driven, not just the necessary adjunct to the Sulzbergers’ plans for national newsprint domination.

  • The final item in the points to be hammered home is one I believe: it’s not so much that the business model for newspapers has collapsed as that it’s changed, today’s newspapers don’t know what the model is, and they’re not following it particularly well anyway.

  • Yep. Lost in the woods. Don’t know who they are; don’t know what they’re supposed to do; don’t know how to do real, sweaty, dig-it-up journalism; don’t know who their readers are or what they need. But they all want to be the New York Times. Or the bloggers.

  • PD Shaw Link

    In some respects, I think the NYTimes is sui generis, it’s a metropolitan newspaper that has sacrificed local subscribers in the chase for national readers. The goal seems worthwhile; the advertising angle seems so daunting. Most papers have more realistic goals.

    I could write my own story about cancelling the WSJ recently, but I was offered a year at something like 90% off. So I renewed with every intention of canceling next year unless they offer similar compensation. Anderson might have rose colored glasses regarding WSJ.

  • There really are two things intertwined here: The local (or regional) newspaper as a source of indispensible local news, supported by local advertising and subscribers, is one thing. The delivery mechanism to Americans for news of what’s going on in the national capital and the world is another.

    We tend to think of them together because we’ve merged them in the daily newspaper in the last 80 or so years.

    If newspapers can go back to being rigorously local, aggressive, accurate and creative, they can survive. Including their editorial pages. They currently are none of those things, however, and aren’t heading in the right direction.

    Which still leaves you with the problem of how to find the beat in the world. A person in Norfolk who wants to know what’s going on in Norfolk would read the paper there. If he wants to know what’s going on in Raleigh, he might find the local newspaper from Raleigh online.

    But that approach won’t work for the corridors of power in Washington, or the jungles of Thailand, or the Iraq War. I think perhaps, sadly, no global media can cover those sorts of things successfully without becoming, eventually, a bias-confirmation machinery.

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