Eric Alterman: I Read the News Today... Oh Boy

[marmar]

from The Nation:


I Read the News Today... Oh Boy
the liberal media
By Eric Alterman




Spend some time on the "future of news" conference circuit, as I have recently, and believe me, you'll need a drink and perhaps a Prozac. 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 lowest point in modern history." When these losses continued to accelerate, Mutter calculated that newspaper stocks had shed an amazing $3.9 billion in value in just the first ten trading days of July, leading to the disappearance of more than 35 percent of these companies' combined stock price in 2008 alone.

It's been nearly two and a half 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 Los Angeles Times just announced that it will cut loose another 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom--this on top of a series of job cuts by the previous owners, which led to a revolving door of resigning editors and publishers who could not in good conscience carry out the cuts demanded of them.

As a result of this avalanche of industrywide layoffs, buy-outs and firings, Mutter notes, the industry's age-old ratio of one journalist per thousand papers in circulation is about to disappear. But as a contributor to Romenesko pointed out, this is "a self-correcting mechanism. As subscribers find less and less to read because newspaper staffs are thinned too much to produce quality copy, subscriptions will lapse and the ratio will be restored--until, of course, additional layoffs refresh the cycle."

For those who embrace the now omnipresent mantra that the staff will simply have to "do more with less," blogger Kevin Roderick of LA Observed notes, "Yes you can put out a good paper with 700 staffers--but not a better paper than the one paying customers are already fleeing."

Corporate responses have also included: asking an already dispirited staff to take a 10 percent pay cut (the Boston Globe); raising the newsstand price by 33 to 50 percent (Gannett, the Wall Street Journal); drastically reducing the newspaper's news/advertising ratio (all Tribune papers); turning the paper's Sunday magazine over to the business staff (the Los Angeles Times); reducing the physical size of the newspaper and cutting down on the news hole (everyone); buying out experienced, knowledgeable staff members and replacing them with underpaid novices (everyone); and closing foreign and national bureaus (almost everyone). Virtually the only expense still intact is executive pay. On the Recovering Journalist blog, Mark Potts notes that the average compensation among the thirteen public-company newspaper CEOs was just under $6 million a year in 2007, according to corporate proxy filings with the SEC. These figures, one can only conclude, are entirely unrelated to performance. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080804/alterman

[enid602]

1. Irrelevant

Could be too that newspapers (like other media) helped hurry along their own demise by not covering events in Bushworld, making them even more irrelevant.

[dbonds]

2. Don't you know TPTB are pissed that they spent 25 years building this propaganda machine...

only to have it nullified by the internet.

[glitch]

5. Reality sucks for them

That's why they are continually trying to create their own. But they suck at that too.

Pity the poor powers that be, all they are really good at is stealing other people's money and trying to make sure no one else can enjoy life either.

[TexasObserver]

3. Corporate Media: Less Taste, More Calories

[cascadiance]

4. And then online providers of news like Yahoo where I work are facing hostile takeovers...

... from the likes of Carl Icahn and Microsoft, who will rip it apart. I'm prioritizing getting my shareholder votes in the mail this weekend to prevent their attempt to takeover the board in the shareholder meeting coming in a week or so.

It's not just that the newspapers, etc. are leaving us, the whole media landscape is being "reshaped", and if we aren't careful make it so that we lose the expertise that made them good news providers with years of experience, and just some other place to grab consumer profile information and sell ads without much content that would really be helpful to us.

Part of the problem, with things like the Yahoo takeover attempt, and other stuff like this, is that many entities see the end of the year approaching with a different legal landscape coming in 2009 if the Dems take over, and many are trying to make their plays right now. I think it would be helpful to talk to many investors, etc. to try and keep some stability in the marketplace, and keep decentralized control over media wherever possible until the newer congress/president/justice department gets to power, so that we can avoid a complete unhealthy fracture in our media systems that would take years to recover (and keep us so uninformed at a time when we need it so much in the coming year or so).

[tanyev]

6. Seems like the Sunday Dallas Morning News gets skinnier every successive week.

If it weren't for TV listings and grocery store coupons, I wouldn't bother.