How do you spell “Schadenfreude”?
Trust The New York Times to add a further dimension of meaning to Benjamin Disraeli’s comment about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When the Audit Bureau published circulation figures for major U.S Newspapers a few days ago, you could, if you closed your eyes and listened hard, make out the strains of Chopin’s funeral march: it was bad news almost everywhere: The Wall Street Journal was down 1.53%, The Washington Post 3.23%. In its own report on the dégringolade, The New York Times, under the headline ““Circulation Plunges at Major Newspapers”, had this to say:
The New York Times, one of the few major papers whose circulation held steady over the last few reporting periods, did not emerge unscathed this time: its daily and Sunday circulation each fell 3.5 percent.
Is that so? Every other story I saw put the performance of the Times rather differently, noting a 4.5% drop in daily circulation and nearly 7.6% drop in the circulation of its Sunday paper. Whom do you believe? Now I begin to understand what the Times means by its motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” What it means is all the news that Pinch will print (”Pinch” being the soubriquet of Sulzberger fils, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s inadvertently comical publisher). Not all the news these days is bad.
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21 Comments
1. David Thomson:I consider the sharp decline of the New York Times and the other leftists dailies (and TV networks) as worrisome. They may be similar to threatened animals fearing extinction—and willing to do anything to stave off the inevitable. Helping Democrats will be perceived as somehow keeping the wolf from the door. The elections of 2008 may very well be their last hurrah. Sliming Republican candidates will be deemed of utmost importance. The GOP should be very worried.
Nov 6, 2007 - 7:47 pm 2. La Russophobe:The Times itself later admitted the 4.5% figure here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/business/media/06adco.html?ref=business
Nov 7, 2007 - 9:35 am 3. Robbins Mitchell:It would seem that Pinchy would rather go down with the ship than address the problems being faced by the once proud NYT….maybe he should change the motto to ‘All the news that’s $h!t,we print’….that at least would be intellectually honest
Nov 7, 2007 - 1:42 pm 4. ras:Technically they did fall 3.5%, much as a baseball pitch made it halfway to the plate … before it made it across the other half, as well. For the NYT, bankruptcy is more of a journey than a destination.
Nov 7, 2007 - 1:47 pm 5. Hacklehead:I consider the sharp decline of the New York Times and the other leftists dailies (and TV networks)
as worrisome. They may be similar to threatened animals fearing extinction—and willing to do anything to stave off the inevitable. Helping Democrats will be perceived as somehow keeping the wolf from the door. The elections of 2008 may very well be their last hurrah. Sliming Republican candidates will be deemed of utmost importance. The GOP should be very worried
…and their death spiral will continue. They are well on their way to becoming a footnote in history. Keep up the good work Pinch.
Nov 7, 2007 - 1:58 pm 6. Jim Thomason:And of course, hidden in the Time’s self-backslap for “maintaining their circulation” for the previous several years is the fact that they had HUGE decreases in the NY area during that time period. They have (or, rather, HAD) managed to maintain their circulation numbers by selling more papers outside of their home area.
Such “long distance” sales might be marginally profitable, but they can’t be nearly as profitable as the local sales they replaced. Not only do they have to pay more to deliver them, but their advertising revenue has to suffer sooner or later.
Why would a NYC-based business pay to advertise in Philadelphia or farther away? Either they received a discount up-front, or have begun to stop/reduce advertising in the Times when their ad responses began to tank. Given the NYT management and it’s short-sightedness and fundemental dishonesty (in the linked piece, for example), IMHO the second possibility is far more likely.
Nov 7, 2007 - 2:26 pm 7. Andy S.:“The GOP should be very worried.”
Indeed they should, along with the right-wing blogosphere. Papers such as the NYT and the WaPo provide these bloggers with a great deal of their reason for being. Without these straw men to pull down, what will they all do?
Nov 7, 2007 - 3:06 pm 8. Banjo:The Times is written and edited for Manhattan, Hollywood, San Francisco and university towns with large faculties and indoctrinated student bodies. The rest of the country isn’t interested.
Nov 7, 2007 - 3:24 pm 9. Ydobon:David Thomson wrote, “The elections of 2008 may very well be their last hurrah. Sliming Republican candidates will be deemed of utmost importance. The GOP should be very worried.”
I’ve been saying that for months. Olbermann’s behavior will be the norm. Hillary’s ideal political machine perfectly meshed with the main stream media will turn Kerry’s 15% boost into a lot more.
Fred would be the ideal counter, by running as a human being. Underplay just like Bush did in 2004 while the Dems overplay their hand with the volume turned up to 12.
Expect the Dem candidate to be flat coming out of the nominating convention, when the candidate is revealed to not be saintly perfection. The same effect that hit Kerry.
The Republican candidate can expect a significant boost from the nominating convention when he’s revealed to not have horns and a tail, just as happened with Bush.
The MSM will crash, hard, after the election, having sold out their credibility much worse than Dan Rather did. It will be a race to increase vitriol as credibility drops, seeking a constant effect. If Hillary is elected she’ll sell them like Bill did feminists, reprising the destruction of a major Democratic force by a sitting Democratic President.
Caveat, newspapers may not last that long. Those circulation figures are beyond soft. I seem to remember the last churn rate for paid circulation was 50%. McClatchy stock has been trending steadily since January to hit zero early next year. Phrases like the need to be “tipping point”, “scared as hell”, and a looming chasm are being bandied about.
Domino effect? The head of AP just admitted problems. By the time the brain of a dinosaur knows it’s been hit, the body is already dead.
There’s a report of advertisers dissatisfaction with ad results, no matter what the circulation figures say. Advertisers may just be paying a kind of talisman money to avoid negative stories about them. Even that may not matter as credibility heads for zero.
The real question may be whether campaign coverage helps newspaper circulation the way the California fires helped the L.A. Times circulation figures. Poor coverage may turn readers off, as the L.A. Times hitpiece on Schwarzenegger proved.
The stresses and divides of the election will render the country ungovernable. No matter who wins they won’t serve out their full term presiding over the USA as it is currently constituted.
Nov 7, 2007 - 3:34 pm 10. Ric Locke:The problem is that the newspapers, especially, have made themselves redundant.
Rightists won’t read them because they’re unrelentingly insulting. Leftists don’t read them because they’re repetitive and redundant, a brief mention of the putative subject followed by an attack on Rightists, especially Bush. The Right doesn’t like them, and the Left doesn’t need them. That leaves them with an audience consisting of slack-jaws who salivate at blood and car crashes, and that audience doesn’t have any money.
And since they did it to themselves, with gusto whilst crowing about their virtue, sympathy is distinctly absent.
Regards,
Nov 7, 2007 - 3:55 pm 11. Frank M.:Ric
Those who celebrate the slow decline of the print media and the leading newspapers in particular may rue the day when our only source of original reporting are a handful of wire services. Television and internet blogs hardly replace these vital sources of information, as imperfect as they are. Ideologues focus only on those stories that fit, or run counter to, their world view. But most stories, for most readers, provide the kind of fresh hard information regarding our communities, large and small, that make for an informed citizenry. So as you dance on the grave of the Times, the Washington Post and any other paper whose views you disagree with, there will be those who are happy that fewer journalists are there to bring their conduct to light.
Nov 7, 2007 - 3:57 pm 12. Curtis:Roger, those fellows (meaning the boys and the girls) don’t quite get the notion that they frequently make fools of themselves.
What to do about it? It beats me. In a general sense, that’s a puzzle. In a private sense, meaning how I look at it, it’s easy … just ignore the poor folks.
Nov 7, 2007 - 5:43 pm 13. Ennis:David,
They would do that anyway, hun.
The thing that none of the dinosaurs in the MSM have figured out is that they are no longer the gatekeepers of information. Their gate started crumbling with the Monica Lewinski affair and was totally blown down by al Qaida on 9/11.
The more they continue to act as the Democratic party’s propaganda machine the faster and faster they will hemorrhage readers/viewers. I am a good example of this. 10 years ago I watched TV, went to movies and read magazines such as Time and Newsweek. I have not touched a copy of Time or Newsweek in probably a good 5 years. I finally got disgusted with the crap coming out of the MSM that I canceled my Dish TV subscription in January. Now the only time my TV is turned on is to watch a movie on DVD. And you know what? I do not miss it at all! The last movie I saw in the theatres was “300″, the one before that was “The Return of the King”. I can count on one hand the movies in my DVD collection that have been made in the last 7 years. The Incredibles, the LotR trilogy, 300 and the first two X-Men movies.
I am not the only one. I now know more people who do not own a TV then do. I also do not know anyone who has a subscription to Time or Newsweek.
No hun, if anyone should be worried it is the MSM and the companies that own them.
Nov 7, 2007 - 6:04 pm 14. Kieran McAuliffe:To quote Roger Kimball…
Nov 7, 2007 - 7:50 pm 15. La Russophobe:“Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s inadvertently comical publisher.”
The sorry and funny story of the New York Times
could be turned into a musical for Broadway.
How about a title such as TIMES UP!
But who would you choose to play Arthur?
I just noticed that the NYT link you have is to a 2006 story, while the link I posted previously is to 2007. Maybe that explains the difference?
Nov 7, 2007 - 7:51 pm 16. La Russophobe:I put up some additional observations about the Times reporting on itself here
http://publiuspundit.com/2007/11/gray_lady_down_1.php
in case anyone is interested, including two links to other recent outrages (Driscoll, NRO).
Nov 7, 2007 - 8:32 pm 17. formerpublisher:David,
You shouldn’t really be all that worried about the “sharp decline.”
There isn’t much of a real decline. You see, for the past 20 years, newspaper publishers have been defrauding their advertisers with fake circulation numbers. This allowed them to raise advertising rates.
Some of them got caught recently, some of them got sued recently. Now, the public companies are walking the fraud back.
This doesn’t represent a staggering loss of readership. It merely represents what the readership was all along. You know – prefraud.
Where’s the SEC on this issue?
Nowhere to be found.
Nov 8, 2007 - 12:19 am 18. Kerry:Frank M. said,”Those who celebrate the slow decline of the print media and the leading newspapers in particular may rue the day when our only source of original reporting are a handful of wire services.”
Nov 8, 2007 - 4:08 am 19. Matt Smith:Sir, you are assumming no better products will arrive to fill the breach. I await the day when I needn’t ask of the original reporting I no longer read in my local paper, “I wonder if this is accurate?” A tangential example, the phrase ‘warrantless wiretapping’ is used over and over to describe what more accurately should be called ’sigint’, signals intelligence. Because the United States has the sine qua non of cell phone capability, a call from Abu al has Zubrick in Yemen to Abu al has Tzseezic in Pakistan can actually pass through equipment in the U.S. A very different creature than a call from Potosi Missouri to O’fallon Illinois. Which one needs a warrant? Which is a “wiretap”? Until these sorts of mischaracterizations cease in newsprint and electric media “original reporting”, I will cheer these declines. Shoddy products deserve to be driven from the marketplace.
Benjamin Franklin published a newspaper when Philadelphia already had many available. Franklin’s newspaper was, by far, the most read of his day. Why? Franklin knew you could not be biased either left or right. He wanted his newspaper to appeal to everyone. And as a result, it did.
Pinch will either supply the leadership to change the approach of the NYT to match Franklin’s model of success or simply become another out-of-business newspaper like many of Franklin’s competitors….My guess is a slow and painfull death.
Nov 8, 2007 - 4:51 am 20. bandit:Sliming Republican candidates will be deemed of utmost importance. The GOP should be very worried. How would that be any different from the MSM campaigning, I mean reporting, now?
Nov 8, 2007 - 5:57 am 21. Linda Seebach:Bias in the wire services,including the NYTimes, is a far more serious problem than anything individual papers display in their own reporting. For most newspaper readers, what the wire services say is the only information they get in their papers about national and international stories. (Few papers outside state capitals are large enough to have bureaus there, let alone in Washington or outside the U.S.)
The local and regional papers have very little leverage over accuracy or consistent slanting of these stories because where else are they going to go?
And these are the stories where the reporters’ and editors’ political views are most likely to influence coverage, deliberately or not. Notice the examples people choose in their comments.
Some earlier commenters appear not to know that the NYTimes, like the
Nov 8, 2007 - 6:05 amWall Street Journal, is printed at a number of locations around the country, so it is no more expensive to deliver from those plants than it is for the local papers that use the same presses. National advertisers pay more for a larger total audience, no matter where it lives, and the regional editions have localized ads.