The American Press Institute held a summit of newspaper CEOs to discuss ways of saving the industry. Yes things are that bad. Here’s an excerpt from the API site:
The daily newspaper industry stands at a precipice. Rocked by declining print circulation and advertising, disruptive Internet technologies and competition from a variety of new players and industries, the traditional bedrock of American journalism faces a classic change-or-die scenario. Whole swaths of the American populace have abandoned newspapers or are growing up without the habit of reading them. And while the Web sites of news organizations are attracting more readers than ever, the online advertising business is nowhere close to making up for the steep slide in print.
At the core of the newspaper’s problems is a decline in the money stream. Their traditional, revenue-generating print vehicles are dying. And they haven’t figured out a way to make money off of the Internet. It’s not just a newspaper problem, but the big flagships of journalism have enormous fixed costs which combined with declining revenues are dragging them into the depths.
A few days ago, the Observer noted that the NYT’s share values had fallen to another 52-week low. “The plunge comes a day after the Times announced that its New England newspapers had declined in value by $166 million, more than the $100 to $150 million that C.E.O. Janet Robinson had projected in a conference call last month. … It’s unimaginable, in a way, that the Company’s stock has fallen so far. At the beginning of the year, the company’s number was consistently in the high teens, and hit a high of $21.14—and that was considered low back then.”
How long can it go on?
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38 Comments
1. DocJim:This is just beating that old horse “market” one more time.
Sarkozy would give them a French government grant to keep publishing, if they would move some part of the operation to Paris.
Watch what happens. “Too big/important to fail.” I promise I have NEVER subscribed to the New York Times.
Nov 16, 2008 - 4:52 am 2. Kirk Petersen:I subscribed to the NYT (or bought it every day at the train station) for nearly two decades. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize the Times, but I take no delight in its decline.
If bigtime media is dying, where are bloggers going to get raw material to discuss? Yes, I know about Michael Yon doing original reporting on the ground in war zones. But there’s not enough money in blogging to sustain the infrastructure of multiple large news operations.
Nov 16, 2008 - 5:30 am 3. wildernesscalling:I already announced the “fix” yesterday, which I know most also already knew, the “O”ne will nationalize the NYT and a couple others just like they (DEMOCART’s) will do the big three AUTO Co. all the large UNIONS will be GOVERNENT subsidized, there is and will be no turning back! Folks you are looking at the infant “Politburo” OBAMA, PELOSI and REID plus a few others….
Nov 16, 2008 - 5:36 am 4. Dave in NC:We are still walking but the urge to start trotting towards the cliff with the other lemmings is getting stronger…..
Of course the media will be “bailed out;” this is payback for their being the propaganda arm of the DNC. Circulation numbers and ad revenue will continue to fall, because no one’s reading / listening / viewing, but it won’t matter; we’ll all be subsidizing them.
“Too big to fail” indeed.
Nov 16, 2008 - 7:09 am 5. Lifeguard:Print media I am wiling to pay for include The Week, The Economist, Harvard Business Review. Print media I am no longer willing to pay for as of a few weeks ago include The Washington Post.
The first three each add value for me in ways that other print media do not:
- The Week summarizes key articles and points from a wide range of other news media
- The Economist is an overall good read (Presidential endorsements aside), offers a nice series of podcasts, and a full audio edition of each issue that I can download and play in the car
- HBR has content I go back to again and again
On the other hand, in exchange for my subscription fees, The Post gave me journalistic malpractice during a key election year. Bury them stacked on the carcass of GM to save space.
Nov 16, 2008 - 7:18 am 6. starling:I am shorting shares of the Washington Post and I had a good week.
Nov 16, 2008 - 7:36 am 7. Pascal:“How long can it go on?” Key elements of the Ministry of Truth will be assembled from institutional relics rescued from the ash heap.
Interesting times.
Nov 16, 2008 - 8:04 am 8. cfbleachers:As long as they continue to fight a culture war, they should die in the trenches they built to murder the truth.
As long as they are willing to fake photographs, forge documents, withhold the truth, distort the truth in order to advance a singular point of view, they should die in the trenches they dug to help steal our information stream.
As long as they are willing to look down their smug and pedantic noses at 80% of this country that doesn’t trust them, doesn’t believe them, doesn’t agree with them…they should die in the trenches they shoveled in order to manufacture the news instead of reporting it.
As long as they think they are above the standards of journalistic ethics and can thumb their noses at each and every rule of objective and fair coverage, they should die in their trenches with the stain of corruption on their fingers.
I do not subscribe to the notion that if they disappear, nobody will be able to take their place. Fake, forged, phony news…is no news at all. It’s propaganda and by any other name, the stench is the same.
They should die in the trenches of their own making. The entrenched media is dying from a disease of their own invention. They raped the information stream and they caught a case of something that is eating away what remains of their very empty soul.
Nov 16, 2008 - 8:24 am 9. Dave D.:…Creative destruction at it’s best. Too big to fail ? Hell, they’ve already failed. What you mean is Too big to die. Even elephants die, and so shall this Big White One.
Nov 16, 2008 - 9:06 am 10. Lifeofthemind:Why couldn’t the NY Sun find a market? It was an amazingly good paper.
Nov 16, 2008 - 9:11 am 11. F:“At the core of the newspaper’s problems is a decline in the money stream.” I disagree, Wretchard. That’s a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that the world has changed and large media outlets have not. At one time the beaver hat industry was huge in the US. It disappeared in a decade when styles changed. What is happening to the large media outlets is not a style change, but it is a change in information buying habits with which the industry has not kept pace. Worse yet, they are arrogant enough to believe they are right and the buying public is wrong. When they finally recognize the simple truth of that error they might save themselves. Until then, they will continue to decline. F
Nov 16, 2008 - 9:55 am 12. Peter Grynch:After we bail out GM, we can look to bailing out the NY Times. This will be done with a “Rush Limbaugh Tax” on profitable journalists to save the endangered liberal Mainstream Media.
Orwell’s Children are alive and well in Congress. Welcome to Dystopia.
Nov 16, 2008 - 10:19 am 13. NahnCee:“Why couldn’t the NY Sun find a market? It was an amazingly good paper.”
Kenneth Anderson wrote an excellent piece on the demise of the NY Times yesterday on Pajamas Media.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/a-requiem-for-my-new-york-times-subscription/2/
Boiled down, what he says is that the Times has been printing to an elite core audience in New York for years, that it had made the business decision to cede actual news gathering (which is hard and expensive) for being an opinion magazine and then *calling* it news. But basically what it has been in business for is to coccoon these NY Masters of the Universe from the rest of the world and the nation, to reassure them of their superiority, and to mirror back to them what they wanted to hear.
I’m guessing that the Times’ downward spiral may have begun when everyone else got tired of reading about NY’s elite and what *they* thought and did, and then the spiral got really bad when that elite started going bankrupt and couldn’t afford to either buy or advertise in the Times any more.
Remember how behind New York and supportive we all were on 9/12? And how in eight years, the NY Times has managed to squander that good will from the rest of the world and the rest of the nation, as well as to bankrupt itself in the effort. Why, it’s almost like they were taking lessons and were in lockstep with George Bush on squandering good will and throwing good money after bad.
Somewhere I read recently that the Times has millions in loans coming due in May 2009 and no way of paying them off. Bush will be gone in January, and it would be wonderful justice indeed if the Times was also gone a mere four months later.
Nov 16, 2008 - 10:49 am 14. Wadeusaf:Most newspapers rely on advertising revenue not subscriptions to pay the piper. That is the revenue stream that is drying up. And that is due to ebay among other new media, not due to the quality or lack there of, of the product the Newsprint organizations are offering.
Nov 16, 2008 - 10:53 am 15. Mike Sylwester:It is also a cultural phenomenon, folks haven’t set aside the time to sit down to read the paper. why should they when you can catch headline news, sports reports, relevant weather data and monitor stock exchanges real time. Stuff in the paper is at least 3 hours old when it is printed, nearly twelve hours old when it hits your front porch. If a story contains any real depth it at least three days old.
IMO, subscribing to a newspaper for “news” is like visiting the zoo to see “wild life”. People are subscribing for local advertising and perhaps a bit of local news. Where, outside of Manhattan does that leave the NYT?
What information does the average person really need? And what information is just nice to have?
We really need information from the government about the laws we must obey, the taxes we must pay, etc. The government itself gives us that information.
We really need information about things we intend to buy or have bought and need to maintain. The companies that manufacture and sell those things give us that information.
We really need information about maintaining and improving our health. The government and a variety of private companies give us that information.
People no longer depend on newspapers for the information they really need. Rather, they depend on newspapers only to read reports of local crimes, local sports, local government, local events, and local human-interest incidents and curiosities.
All the other information and features in a newspaper could be obtained from other sources.
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:04 am 16. Mr. Frank:Great post cfbleachers!
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:05 am 17. cjm:everything dies eventually, and newsasaurus rex is no exception. the “why” is incidental in relation to the “is”. their role will be filled by people on the street providing raw real-time feeds, and online analysis and synthesis.
just what value does a dim witted “journalist” actually add to the process? which journalist has the historical breadth of VDH? or the technical strengths of SDB? none.
good riddance to them all, may they enjoy the corporate landfill they eventually occupy.
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:12 am 18. NahnCee:THe thing about both the NY Times and the LA Times is they wanted world and national breadth. I remember reading one of the first stories out of Baghdad after the Americans entered was about the NY Times illegally confiscating someone’s office building to establish their Baghdad bureau. Which was interesting since all they ever printed after that was Al-Queda related stringer’s photoshops and lies.
The LA Times insists, too, on being a national and international paper. Some years ago one of its moonbat photograhers won a Pulitzer for pictures taken inside a church that the dreadful Palestinians were hiding from the Jewish cops in. The story managed to make the terrorists into heroes despite the fact that they were using different parts of the church as toilets.
You’d think that the LA Times (and the NY Times, too) could make a decent living just reporting local news, which is all I really require of them. If TMZ.com and thundering herds of papparazzi can make money off the locals, then why can’t the Timesx2?
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:30 am 19. E. Nigma:The coming thing:
Internet taxes. “National” sales tax on internet purchases. Taxes on blogs, taxes on ISP’s. Much more effective in silencing the little man than any kind of “Fairness Doctrine”.
The money will go to “bailouts” of the favored.
I can only hope the NY Times ends up like some of the government housing that Obama and friends “bailed out” in South Chicago.
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:31 am 20. SpeakEasy:News is not dead, it just has evolved to digital. Wadeusaf is correct in noting that print media is yesterday’s news when we have the internet on computers and instant headlines on your cell phone. Perhaps reporting will again become a vocation replete with journalistic integrity (dare I hope?) instead of a racket. Media does not matter, content does. The days of Big Newsprint are over. But smaller more localized papers will still exist when the national chains fail. I beleive they can, and will be sustained through subsciption and advertisement within their local areas. Darwin would approve.
Nov 16, 2008 - 11:47 am 21. Panday:Most newspapers have become leftist rags over the years, anyway. I am not very sympathetic.
Nov 16, 2008 - 12:25 pm 22. Derek:I purchase the services of a newspaper for two reasons:
Access to a fine tuned bs detector.
Access to research and on the spot information.
Oddly enough, I just last month installed equipment in a newly set up local newspaper, in this small town which already has 3. Yes, three. One of the local journalists made news (!) by actually asking real questions to the local candidates for federal election. There was more discussion of his questions than the answers, it being so unusual.
As for the national papers, they don’t provide either of the two things I would buy them for, so I don’t.
Derek
Nov 16, 2008 - 1:33 pm 23. Leo Linbeck III:The problem with the NYT business model is not its bias. That’s a problem, but you can run a business with an ideological bias. Think Starbucks, Google, Chick-Fil-A, or Amway.
No, the problem is that it relies on monetizing its readership through advertising. But the print model – show the same advertising to everyone who reads the paper – is inherently inefficient relative to the model created by Google, eBay, Amazon, or other on-line companies.
Content providers have not been able to find a way to monetize their content on the internet. The companies that have thrived have done so by providing other services – search, auction, retail – that can more easily be monetized. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, et. al. have not yet found a way to really monetize their audience, although there are models on the way. When they do, the broadcast networks and perhaps cable too will find themselves in the position of the NYT.
It’s sad to see an industry replaced by technological progress. I’ll be there were a lot of employees who lost their jobs, and investors their money, when vacuum tubes were replaced by transistors. But the nation is better off; maybe not in a Pareto optimal way, but in a net positive way.
The NYT will survive this change if they adapt. They will need to cut overhead dramatically, go private, delever, and spin off unrelated businesses. They will flush an enormous amount of during this adaptation process. The Sulzbergers will have a choice of being very wealthy or owning the NYT. They can’t do both. That time has passed, or more precisely time has passed them by.
However, at the end, the NYT could end up a small, niche, profitable business serving a rarified audience that will talk among themselves about the latest article they read, and what an incredible difference it makes to read a real newspaper; you know, one like the newspapers of old.
Kinda the way audiophiles talk about vacuum tubes.
L3
Nov 16, 2008 - 1:40 pm 24. Leo Linbeck III:Errata:
No, the ^business problem…
I’ll bet [not be] there were a lot of employees…
They will flush an enormous amount of ^capital during this adaptation process…
Apologies.
L3
Nov 16, 2008 - 1:45 pm 25. whiskey:It’s quite likely that newspapers and TV broadcast news organizations will get lots of government money and thus overt control as part of Obama’s campaign to replicate the worst parts of Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
The inflection point of traditional media’s decline came with Drudge’s publishing of the Monica affair. People understood that they were not getting the real story, and that was compounded by the full-throated defense of Clinton and what the meaning of the word “is” is.
Nov 16, 2008 - 1:56 pm 26. 49erDweet:Obviously the elephant known as NYT is finally dying. Hopefully the LAT will be next. That doesn’t mean other dominant media sources won’t take their places. The new puppies will just be different. And hopefully resort on reportage rather than commentary.
I can never understand the arrogance of those assuming we’ll pay so they can tell us how to think. Boggles the mind.
Nov 16, 2008 - 2:59 pm 27. RWE:Relative to the value of advertising to a paper, here is an extreme case I ran into.
A certain “paper” which is published about once a week and consists almost entirely of classified ads offers the following deal:
Internet-Only access to the classifieds at their website: $3.00 a month
One copy of the paper per month plus the Internet access to their website: $1.00 a month
Yes, they charge you $2.00 a month to NOT receive the print edition. Obviously the commercial ads they publish in addition to the many, many classifieds are lucrative. And they charge you 3 times as much NOT to get them as they do to be able to avoid them. The Internet access is far more desirable for the classifieds than the print version, since you can respond to an ad showing what you want to buy. They know that and don’t want to become an Internet-only source.
Nov 16, 2008 - 4:36 pm 28. Peter:re: 19. E. Nigma:
The coming thing:
Do you mean like the Private copying levy?
I think the precedent is there for you wrote.
Nov 16, 2008 - 4:49 pm 29. James:Information isn’t free.
Nov 16, 2008 - 6:26 pm 30. Mark B:Some news is hard to collect, or excruciatingly dull to collect. You have to _pay_ reporters to find it and somebody to check it. We need that info, so somehow we have to pay the reporters. (Citizen news blogging is nice, sometimes very accurate and in-depth, but you can’t rely on it being there. And I don’t especially trust press releases, which often seem to hope that we have no memory.)
Apparently print ads aren’t efficient and the dead tree model is dying. OK. Are web ads proving equal to the task of paying the reporters? Web ads plus subscriptions? Who has made it pay? If it isn’t completely paying the bills we have a little problem.
James:
Information isn’t free.
Some news is hard to collect, or excruciatingly dull to collect. You have to _pay_ reporters to find it and somebody to check it. We need that info, so somehow we have to pay the reporters. (Citizen news blogging is nice, sometimes very accurate and in-depth, but you can’t rely on it being there. And I don’t especially trust press releases, which often seem to hope that we have no memory.)
——————————————————————–
This is why they stopped collecting it and starting paying “foreign contributors” for news stories. This is why propaganda rules in foreign war zones from Iraq to Afghanistan to Lebanon.
This is also why I read this blog, intelligent discussion of world events.
Most Americans don’t even know that Georgia is a country. Why is that?
Nov 16, 2008 - 6:41 pm 31. NahnCee:Why do most Americans *need* to know that Georgia is a country? Do they buy anything from Georgia? Do they send anything to Georgia? Have we ever gone to war with Georgia? How does the fact that there is some acreage that’s named itself Georgia across a very large ocean and continent away from most Americans affect them?
Really – we *hire* people to know stuff like that so we don’t have to bother ourselves with tons of itty-bitty unimportant details and minutae!
Nov 16, 2008 - 7:04 pm 32. Leo Linbeck III:James,
It’s a question of supply and demand. My read of this is there is simply too much supply: too many “reporters” who really have nothing useful to report on.
There are lots of other models, most of which are pay-to-play. People who write about the economy get paid a lot by business leaders and investors. Bloomberg, in particular, makes a fortune off of providing information to these people. A similar thing seems to happen in foreign affairs, defense industry, etc. And of course there are thousands of industry rags – from Variety to Women’s Wear Daily to InfoWorld – that give very focused and high quality content and analysis. They make plenty of money, judging by their growth.
Fact is, very, very few things that are really important happen real-time. Even when they do, the value of having a reporter parachute in, “record” what’s happening, and then return to his rent-controlled flat in Greenwich Village, is low. You get lots of noise, which obscures the signal. One of the problems with the daily newspaper model is that it must create news when there is none; same for cable news networks. Readership goes up when there’s some event, then goes back down again. The incentive is therefore to manufacture more “crises.” Frankly, most folks are just tired of all this sensationalism mixed with obscurantism and topped with ignorance.
Besides, when there is a real crisis, the internet is more useful anyway. At least you get lots of raw data, vs. a collection of selected transcriptions that is fit into a pre-determined narrative. You can decide for yourself, rather than have Bill Keller decide for you. If it’s really important, you’ll take the time to figure it out. If not, you’ll go back to your regularly scheduled life.
I’m afraid this means that we will have fewer professional journalists working in the future. However, once the guild is broken, the Michael Yon’s of the world might actually be able to make more money. This may not be good for the Sulzbergers, but I’m pretty sure that will be a good thing for our polity.
Now if we can just figure out how to do the same thing to the legal profession…
L3
Nov 16, 2008 - 7:48 pm 33. RWE:In my job I have to collect data on certain technical subjects and have on occasion had to phone or e-mail some small town newspapers and request information on stories they have done. These are real small town newspapers, in places you never heard of. And I have found that they are a good source of information, generally much better at detail and accuracy than the national media or even the specialized press, such as Aviation Week. One reason they are good sources is that they just print the facts and provide statements by people who were there. Those local yokels are too dumb and unsophisticated to improperly analyze the information or put on a big city MSM style spin after clearing it with the NYT. The poor little guys just print the facts. And most of them don’t even have websites worthy of the name.
And then there are the websites and newsletters created by enthusiasts. Once again, they are better sources of data.
One day, maybe, someone will figure out how to tie all these small, diverse, but superior sources of data together in some fashion. And the Port Lavel Times and Camden News and their ilk will replace the NYT and its kind in fact; they have already far surpassed the MSM in journalistic integrity.
Nov 16, 2008 - 8:25 pm 34. MarkL:Q. Why is the (Australian) Financial Review making money as a print newspaper if the above is true?
A. Because the Financial Review understands that NEW facts sell. And the customers KNOW that NEW facts are valuable enough to buy. And they also know that NEW facts are expensive to get hold of, but worth it to do so. And so, to hell with the cost of the paper – it is worth it.
On top of that, the Financial Review’s editors understand something else. They understand that they cannot bullshit their readership. It is commercial death to do so and they know it. So they enforce a breathtakingly revolutionary radical methodology on their reporters. Something the NYT, the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald have never heard of.
It is called JOURNALISM:
1. State what the facts are
2. State what is NOT known yet (this is also a promise to look for it)
3. State your analysis (tell the reader what the reporter thinks)
4. Make absolutely bloody certain that the reader understands which of the above is which
If the Melbourne Age, NYT etc are too damned stupid or blinded by ideology to do the above, good riddance to them. I for one will dance a jig on their graves.
MarkL
Nov 17, 2008 - 4:44 am 35. Ed Giese:Not in Canberra at all.
@L3
These threads about dying newspapers occur often in the blogosphere, and very often they start with ideologically partisan comments like “serves them right,” followed by a few who write, with sadness, that the newspapers were doomed not by their partisanship but the changing business model necessitated by technology. I think that the bigger picture is that both viewpoints are spot on.
From its very start, the idea of impartial “professional” journalism was an illusion, though a very profitable one in the 1900s. Of course, to keep a straight face while saying one is “totally objective” in “reporting news,” there is a certain amount of drudgery in chasing down actual facts and reporting enough of both sides to avoid criticism. There is still a lot of room for bias that flies beneath the radar. Well, the MSM flew up into just about everyone’s radar zone this past election, and they heartily deserve any laughs they must endure about their value– value rooted as it has been for a century in their vaunted objectivity.
The institutional bias of large MSM organs reached its highest power, in my opinion, in their overreach during the Vietnam conflict. I can hardly blame them for wanting to relive the glory days. It’s been downhill since then, first driven by cable TV, and more recently in a big way by the internet.
No amount of Orwellian interference by the government will be able to hold back the tide. I don’t doubt that some in government have the desire, but the technology is simply too explosive. Short of totally outlawing the internet, Americans are simply too entrepreneurial and innovative to meekly stand down in the face of information bullying.
The real interesting questions are actually epistemological. What mechanisms for truth seeking and truth telling will evolve when bias, fact reporting, and public cogitation are all decentralized? People are still willing to pay for facts, but what business model will emerge to employ the minority of people who love to find and tell them?
There is much cause for optimism. The internet has the potential for vastly better fact checking than all of the letters to the editor and ombudsmen in the world. And Wretchard, the day will surely come when Google doesn’t get most of the profits from click-ads, and folks like yourself who write so well will find that rewards for one’s efforts can be far more profitable and reliable than a tip jar. I still remember when Microsoft would always be on top, and before that, Lotus.
Nov 17, 2008 - 9:58 am 36. exDemocrat:I will do everything in my power to destroy these marxist b*stards.
Let’s roll.
Nov 17, 2008 - 12:06 pm 37. exDemocrat:If you haven’t read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” it’s time.
A 50-year-old masterpiece that illuminates today’s world and gives strength to fight.
Nov 17, 2008 - 12:22 pm 38. Leo Linbeck III:Ed Giese,
Excellent post. Brands die slowly, but brands that abandon the reason for their success do die. Eventually.
Cheers.
L3
Nov 17, 2008 - 9:46 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.