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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The American Newspaper is Dead |
| 2014-05-05 |
| A republic depends on the press. The numbers are bad. Really bad. Owning a newspaper these days is like owning a white elephant. Except white elephants don't have their own unions. The AEI numbers tell the tale. Read more at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #13 The only thing I will miss are the "funnies" (comic strips I used to love as a kid). Kids loved Grit because they could make money selling Grit on Saturday and people loved Grit because they got the big Sunday Funnies on Saturday. |
| Posted by: Bubba Graiting8281 2014-05-05 23:32 |
| #12 Newspapers are already dead, now what can e do about the waste paper that clogs the Mail? |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2014-05-05 21:52 |
| #11 I find the only utility of the local newspaper is local news and as a delivery system for coupons. Large newspapers have been, as the article suggests, permanently supplanted by other sources. I disagree with the author that MSNBC is a canary-in-the-coalmine for cable news. MSNBC is a lousy product, and the market is voting with what we used to call "the clicker." |
| Posted by: Uncle Phester 2014-05-05 20:04 |
| #10 Funny how that happens to monopolies that gouge the public. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2014-05-05 15:49 |
| #9 Yep classifieds were a gold mine. But even before the interwebs, small locals were starting to eat up the classified cash with free 4 liners with a business build on display ads. Worked well. Still does to a certain extent. Of course I still hang around washaterias from time to time, especially in NOLA where you can have a shooter while you watcher your pants rotate. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2014-05-05 15:33 |
| #8 Not just Craigslist. Realtor.com and like-minded real estate web sites have sucked away the real estate ads. Various auto websites have sucked away the car ads. Help wanted? You don't look in a newspaper. Stock quotes? You certainly don't look in a newspaper. Newspapers worked for 400 years as aggregators -- news, sports, fashion, local, international, politics, 'style', etc, all in one package supported by ads. The problem is that they've been dis-aggregated. What they have left I can get elsewhere. So why bother with them? I do think that at some point the new news, as TW lists them, will be charging for their news. They have to; ads won't support their operations given the abysmally low click-through rates. That by the way demonstrates the real value of advertising -- low -- and should make everyone on Madison Street shudder. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2014-05-05 15:30 |
| #7 Craigslist and online adverts took away their lifeblood. Check out how much your local rag charges to run a couple-inch obit. Screw them |
| Posted by: Frank G 2014-05-05 14:52 |
| #6 Dead of a self inflicted wound. It didn't have to be that way if only they had maintained the objectivity that is, I think, still taught or at least still given lip service in most colleges' Journalism 101. These days I don't see how anybody with any moral integrity could work at most newspapers. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2014-05-05 13:23 |
| #5 Plus the "Paper' Is 3/4 size, in short it's shrunk. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2014-05-05 12:40 |
| #4 Oddly enough, reporters aren't sending in stories via telegraph or telephone anymore, either. We've got a vibrant press whose numbers, if not necessarily profits aren't sucking wind. It's just that it's all on-line, mocked for writing articles at home in pyjamas. News junkies don't get their information from the New York Times, et al anymore, they get it from The Blaze, PJ Media, Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, and even Daily Kos, God bless 'em, among others. And what perhaps no one has noticed is that a lot of their staff -- just like Fox News, not coincidentally -- are professionally trained journalists downsized from the paper'n'ink organizations. The major British newspapers' biggest source of clicks these days comes through Drudge, and they've altered their reporting focus accordingly, to the benefit of all involved. We've even got a startling number of the formerly ink-stained among Rantburg's readers, and therefore among the moderators. Our lordly, Columbia-trained journalists are being out-competed by the nimble, electron-stained reporters of the internet. Darwin always wins. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2014-05-05 12:32 |
| #3 Never confuse the institution of the 'press' with the technology of disseminating information. "Freedom of the Press" was about the free flow of information when the technology of the time was the printing press. The modern institution is just as much about the suppression and corruption of information has any flow of it. This medium is now supplanting the corruption in that flow and the laziness of those who prefer others to do their thinking for them (see Sheeple). |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2014-05-05 08:20 |
| #2 America itself may have peaked in 2000. But the newspaper has been useful to wrap glassware, line bird cages and to be mocked by the objective reader. They newspaper editor made a poor choice between his responsibility (and commercial success) and becoming the propaganda arm of the leftist progressive movement. No comment from MSNBC or CNN. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2014-05-05 06:22 |
| #1 What the article doesn't say out loud is the major problem for newspapers is not the medium or the unions. Its the message. The majority of their readers rejected decades ago, but that the editorial boards and Journalism schools cling ever more desperately to. |
| Posted by: Jimp Forkbeard8158 2014-05-05 00:33 |