No, the headline isn’t referring to I-1000 mentioned below, the sensible and humane statewide initiative that would allow physicians to (legally) prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients under narrow circumstances. Rather, I’m talking about Eric Alterman’s column in today’s Seattle P-I, chronicling the slow, sad death of our daily newspapers.
The flight of readers and advertisers to the Web has led to an unprecedented assault on stockholder value, making newspapers the investment equivalent of slow-motion seppuku.
For instance, on July 11 Alan Mutter’s invaluable Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reported that in “perhaps the worst single trading day ever” for the newspaper business, “the shares of seven publicly held newspaper companies today plunged to the(ir) lowest point in modern history.”
When losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed $3.9 billion in value in just the first 10 trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of those companies’ combined stock price in 2008 alone.
It’s been nearly 2 1/2 years since the much-missed Molly Ivins observed of media moguls that, “for some reason, they assume people will want to buy more newspapers if they have less news in them and are less useful.”
And yet the strategy continues unabated.
The accountants may tell you that the logical thing to do is to cut expenses in line with declining revenue, but I’m pretty damn sure newspaper publishers would be better off heeding Ivans’ commonsense observations than those of the bean counters. The newspaper industry is in the midst of a rapid and dramatic transformation that does not have to lead to its death. Now is the time for innovation and risk taking; those who gamble right will win and thrive, while those who gamble wrong may perish. But those who don’t gamble at all—who merely continue to do the same old thing, but less of it—will slowly and surely drift off into oblivion, their own obituary dominating the front page of their final edition.
And that’s a death without dignity.
Personally, I’m rooting for the Times and the P-I to gamble right. I know there are some at those papers who take my relentless criticism as some form of deep seated hostility, but I’m a child of Watergate, an avid newspaper consumer who grew up idolizing reporters. Yeah, sure, I’m a tough critic… but only because I care.
And if anybody in management at either daily ever wants to sit down and talk with me about my ideas for reimagining the newspaper business (some of which don’t even include hiring me), I’m always up for a cup of coffee or a beer. You know how to reach me.
Sorry folks – if the “real newspapers” can’t compete they should go. How is it that blogs and other online sources of news have succeeded? They were more open to a dialog than a speech. They employed a citizen rule mentality that while not always pretty, took the control away from the elites.
The fact that the advent of Faux News Channel and its financial success, drew the daily newspapers to try to compete, was a big misstep. They should have continued to serve the public interest and stop worrying about the money. If they did serve the public interest the money would follow.
Why is it that you Goldy have to be the one to figure out that Brownie (heck of a job) was an idiot? I’ll tell you why. Because the mainstream newspapers were too busy chasing a dime.
Goldy ain’t lying. Take the Weekly World News. It folded last year, both print and online version. Back in the 80’s, circulation was over a million per issue. As recently as ’06, it sunk to around 80 thousand. A lot of people thought it wasn’t a serious newspaper, but they scooped a lot of other news organizations. Sure stories like “Man accidently chainsaws leg off, and it gets up and hops away,” might be a stretch, but in June of ’05 they had this on their cover, “2nd Great Depression Just Weeks Away.” Pretty prophetic, huh?
I look forward to seeing Rupert Murdoch collecting shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Recent DNA sampling of Republicans has caused anthropologist to rethink their conclusion that Neanderthals are extinct.
Don’t crow too much over the death of newspapers until you consider what they’re being replaced with. The problem is that in their demise, legacy media sold advertising on their adjoining web sites for pennies on the dollar in terms of audience reached – setting the standard for what advertisers are willing to pay. The result is that a decade in, precious few people have been able to monetize their web content to any degree – and THAT means most people (like Goldy) can only do this as a labor of love, not as a serious paying gig (let alone career).
Goldy and folks like him in other cities can comment on the news, and get the low-hanging fruit (e.g., tips that walk in the door). But a room full of paid reporters can do a lot more to inform a citizenry. Whether they do or not, in the current makeup of MSM, is another issue and a big part of their problem; but they have the capacity to do primary source reporting in a way volunteer bloggers can’t.
Even at a bad paper, they fulfill a valuable function. Ask anyone who lives on the Eastside and wonders, with both the Journal and the Times’ suburban edition gone, what their local elected officials are up to. No matter how lame the paper, when those newsroom jobs go away – and aren’t replaced by their equivalents somewhere else – we all lose.
One of the reasons I love visiting the west side of the state is that I can wake up in the morning, walk down to the street, and buy the Times, PI, News Tribune, Olympian, and a couple of others depending on whether I’m north or south of Seattle. Here in Spokane it’s the Spokesman and nothing else, and that’s a shame.
I don’t know if the medium can be saved, but I’ll sure be sad when it’s gone.
Kenneth Copeland is a televangelist who preaches “prosperity” religion. His followers believe that possessing wealth is a sign of God’s favor. Copeland certainly applies this principle to himself: He and his wife live in a $6 million mansion, travel on a $17.5 million private jet, operate for-profit companies, and have dozens of relatives and friends on their church’s payroll. And Copeland thinks how he uses his church’s non-profit IRS status is none of the U.S. Senate’s business.
There are those that revel in the idea that newspapers are slowly dying, and not just folks on the right.
Ideologues and fanatics on both sides of the political spectrum understand that the only way they will get widespread acceptance of their agendas is if there isn’t some reasonably neutral observer pointing out just how absurd their positions really are.
The neo-cons want to limit access to information so that they can go about running the country to their benefit, while milking the middle and working classes.
But we have some that also want to control access to information, so that they can control those same folks. Their tool of choice is the “class war” against the “elite”. Historically, the end result is the same.
Neither the far left nor the far right really wants anyone to look very hard at exactly who or what they are fighting. Their tactics and goals are almost indistinguishable. Just the names have been changed.
We’ve seen it many times throughout history. While the neo-cons would have us believe that the first thing a dictatorship does is take the guns, in reality, the first casualty of any totalitarian state, whether socialist, communist or facist, is a free and honest press.
Good news reporting, from dedicated folks that at least try to report the actual facts and situations, is the enemy of both extremes.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” said the Wizard to Dorothy.
Voting Republican is disorderly conduct.
Actually, the real losers are the small local papers that serve rural areas. Growing up in Port Angeles, I only saw the PI and Times one day a week, that being Sunday. The arrival of USA Today changed things as much as the internet. This got the area’s larger papers to market for aggressively outside their immediate areas to get more revenue to compete against Gannett. I was in PA last week, and now I could get the PI, Times, TNT, even the NY and LA papers without looking too hard. Here in Reno, the Reno Gazette-Journal has to fight against the Sacramento Bee and SF Chronicle. In so many words, the papers with the bigger money drown out the smaller voices, and local journalism suffers. The same thing has happened with terrestrial radio, and now even my beloved XM satellite radio is not merging with, but being bought out by rival Sirius.
i’m with geov on this one. but as goldy notes it is time for these papers to innovate a bit and it seems like the seatimes is especially having trouble doing that. like maybe have some opinion in your paper and no i am not talking about brodeur who gets paid what two average reporters do. she should be first to go when they are chopping dead wood.
Looks like the Rabbit’s off his meds again. Any way to stay “on topic”? Hmmm?
The decline of newspapers is the decline of reason and rationality: Conservative traits. The liberal idea of “gotta have it now” has led to non-stop television addiction. Short term attention spans. Symptomatic of the culture that America has been guided into by the deceptive left: No fault insurance, no fault home loans; indeed a society decrying responsibility and morality.
Along with the drastic decline in the quality of education in this country (how come more money hasn’t led to smarter and brighter students?), which has led to Johnny not even being able to read at anything approaching an advanced level, the decline of readership of nespapers, books, indeed any and all printed material, was and is predictable.
As America heads towards totalitarianism, Orwell’s 1984 writ large, the desire to read and become informed (as opposed to constant entertainment) will surely die out.
And, an unintelligent and uninvolved citizenry is that much easier to lead around by the nose. Just look at the debasement of the democrat candidate’s platform and arguments. Naive beyond the point of being ignorant.
cmiklich
While we certainly disagree politically, I agree that an uninformed citizenry is easier to “lead around by the nose“.
At that point, whether they get led to the left or the right is largely academic.
Certainly this has been noticed by the right, as evidenced by the neo-con agenda, and the success that it has had, especially among “low-information” voters.
But there are folks on the left that want to control the flow of information for our benefit as well. I believe this group has less influence with us than the equivalent right wing group has with you, but you are welcome to disagree if you wish.
I have often said that liberals have nothing to fear from intelligent, well-informed conservatives. It’s that batch of uninformed, “low-information” voters that worry me. They can be too easily swayed to go along with things like torture, abandoning freedoms, and unneccesary wars.
You may believe that those same voters are also too willing to go along with bloated government programs, wasteful spending, and an attitude of dependence, and I would find it difficult to disagree.
The slow death of the newspaper, along with the consolidation of news sources overall, doesn’t serve the majority of either the left or the right.
But it certainly serves the ideologues of both sides.
http://redwing.hutman.net/~mre.....ologue.htm
(You may want to check out some of the other “Flame Warriors”. If you cannot find yourself (and me, too) then you simply aren’t looking hard enough.
cmiklich reads quite a lot of right wing bullshit through the e-mail or right wing news sites like Wingnut Daily and NewsWhacks.
It’s where he got the crap about the Cubans and Chinese “slant drilling” for “our” oil.
The crap about American sliding towards totalitarianism is pretty much crap – if it weren’t for the Bushies reading all the electronic communications – literally none of if is safe from the prying eyes and ears of the NSA and other agencies.
YLB
While agreeing with you about cmiklich’s politics, he actually has a point about America sliding towards totalitarianism.
But either he hasn’t thought it all the way through, or he’s at least as appalled by the actions of the Bush administration as any lefty around here.
The current administration has attacked our most basic liberties, and has declared themselves to be unaccountable to the rule of law. The President has called our Constitution a “scrap of paper”.
Sounds like a slide towards totalitarianism to me. I just pray that we’ve caught it in time.
The “unintelligent and uninvolved citizenry” that he is rightly complaining about allowed our country to get into the war in Iraq and passively aquesced while our liberties were being attacked. Remember, we may have been lied to, but there was enough evidence available to debunk those lies, had we only looked for it.
The conservative that makes an active attempt to keep informed, and who has the best interests of the country at heart is no enemy of mine. We may have entirely different perspectives, but we can find ways to work together.
But there are whackos on the fringes, beating the drum and trying to rally the troops, while demonizing anyone that disagrees with them in the slightest. Those folks depend on people being kept ignorant and uninformed, and quite frankly, they scare the hell out of me.
So, while I think that cmiklich is probably more concerned with the New York Post than the New York Times, and likely gets much of his news from newsmax. I think that he’s got a point.
Here, at least, he’s decrying the decline of the newspaper, and claiming that it shows a decline in reason and rationality.
And I agree with him.
The biggest problem facing print media dailies is the enduring misperception rampant among mid-market management teams and editorial staffs that they are operating the same business as the NYT, the LA Times, or the WAPO – just smaller.
That religious faith that every single news room from St. Petersburg to Seattle is only different from the Gray Lady in terms of size is guaranteed to result in them steadily shrinking into dust.
Take the devotion to featured content. Local celebutard chatterers like Nicole Brodeur, Bob Jamieson, Danny Westneat, or even Joel Connelly. Pouring staff budget into the vague hope of scoring a local or national hit the likes of Molly Ivens or Dave Barry is pure blue sky. But managing editors cling to the idea like it was oxygen. And so we are lulled back to sleep over our morning coffee with yet another rendition of “The Jersey Girl’s” perspective on life in quaintly peculiar Puget Sound, or desperate pipe-dream pleas for the return of the extinct moderate Republican.
Don’t these morons know that there are a half dozen free lancers haunting every Cafe Vita in town who will be happy to crank out this garbage for pennies per word? Bloggers do it every day for free. Is it really worth it to pay a featured columnist the salary of three reporters for such content? It only is if you nurse the dellusional faith that one of them will one day flower into a David Halberstam or George F. Will and carry your masthead to glory with them.
Both our local dailies have the budgets to produce content rich, informative, and exciting editions every single day. But they are too focused on emulating a business model that they cannot aspire to, but which the traditions of their profession have trained them to believe they must aspire to.
Geov and John B. have it right.
Here we have Goldy, who’s certainly competent but nearly starving as he works his butt off reporting on a few issues mostly related to local poltics, while the rest of us work for free adding details and local color. Meanwhile, the mainstream press hands him their readership by suppressing stories and failing to report real issues and events, while their advertisers pull their print ads and buy Web banner placements for pennies.
Unless there are some pretty significant changes, the endgame ain’t gonna be pretty. After print journalism withers and dies, and the TV networks whittle their “news” coverage down to celebrity pregnancies and major league sports, nobody will go to school to learn journalism because there won’t be any work in that field that pays a living wage. (Great job Goldy et al are doing of serving as scabs to put union newsies out on the street!)
After that, all that remains is for the government to shut down most of the Net or seize the domain of anyone trying to publish what it doesn’t like (and yes, Virginia, the US governemt can still do either of those things) and we’ll have a tyrant’s ultimate wet dream: a completely ignorant populace.
Two thoughts.
First, the decline of the newspapers- Ivins had it right. What papers SHOULD do to stop the slide is emphasize and work even harder at what they do BETTER than the newmedia.
A newspaper will never, ever be able to compete with the internet for speed of reporting and interactivity. So don’t screw around TRYING too hard at it; sure, use internet stuff as much as possible, but don’t try to make the daily paper a paper version of what’s online. It won’t work.
Secondly, a lot of the media’s issues seem bad but in reality are just a reflection of the vast improvement in productivity that a lot of other industries have seen.
It used to make sense for many of the big daily papers from each city to have plenty of reporters on board, because you needed it to cover ALL kinds of stories.
Now? Now, thanks to instant communications, you don’t need to have tons of reporters. A paper can simply buy wire service coverage. One reporter doesn’t write for one paper anymore; one reporter writes for a dozen papers, or a hundred papers, or however many papers and people want to read something that’s distributed, essentially instantly, online.
So what papers need to do is refocus their LOCAL efforts. Don’t bother covering national news stories; just buy ’em from the big guys. (That’s what the Seattle Times has been doing- noticed the increased content from the New York Times?)
Instead, focus on the local stories that the wire services aren’t covering.
And do a better job with analysis and in-depth reporting, stuff that the instant-news world (online and TV) don’t cover well.
It is the leftist bias in the MSM that has contributed greatly to their decline. Goldy wants to help them reimagine their positions, which is an excellent solution to hastening their decline.