Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

The New Day appears to be folding this week.

rip we hardly knew ye

fuck that was fast. is that a record launch-to-shutdown turnaround?

http://i.imgur.com/5xlX4ei.jpg

Jeez, what happened in 2007-2008?

my best guess: the Great Recession == the bottom falling out of ad revenue

Said in the "Mourning in America" thread but repeated here:

The press (broadly speaking) capitulating and normalizing Trump/Trumpism is a distressing prospect.

On the other hand, the press overtly presenting itself as an opposition entity (or counterweight) also has its problems.

Not least that it will sound (to lots and lots of people) like a nakedly partisan stance. It also makes lots of people kneejerkily question the press's ostensible commitment to the mushy and troublesome concepts that usually get called objectivity/fairness/balance/equal time.

I've said this often enough but "we say nice things about each party exactly half the time, and mean things about each party exactly half the time" is a very stupid criterion of fairness. But a lot of people seem to think that's what it means. Changing that perception is not simple.

If roughly half the people think being "objective" means only being mean to the president half the time, then we have a long ways to go before there can be an active fourth estate that has any legitimacy in the eyes of the public and any ability to inform/educate the persuadable public.

As long as there are tens of millions of people saying things like: Snopes is an Obama mouthpiece owned by Soros; why should I trust the obviously partisan Washington Post/New York Times; of COURSE Politifact and Glenn Kessler are biased leftists... The media's just preaching to the converted and it won't change any of the minds that need to change.

hat tip to Alfred for posting this link the other day on the Mourning in America thread:

And Scott at LGM's emphasis:

It’s worth pausing here to observe how astounding this is. The Times ran three front page stories about the FBI director having found some emails that very predictably revealed no relevant information about a trivial pseudoscandal that involved no significant misconduct by Hillary Clinton. Three. To choose at random from the countless things Donald Trump did that were far worse than legally using a private email server, Donald Trump called for innocent African-Americans to be lynched. A search of nytimes.com of “Donald Trump Central Park five” and “Donald Trump Central Park jogger” reveals no news stories and one op-ed about it. Perhaps the search is failing to pick up something, but we can safely conclude it received far less coverage.

The Harvard Kennedy Center also just published a study on how lopsided the coverage was:

http://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/

Key graf that reinforces my biases / priors, so of course I'll pull quote the whole thing:

When asked to explain their focus on Trump, journalists say that he made himself readily available to the press.[13] But availability has never been the standard of candidate coverage. If that were so, third-party candidates and also-rans would dominate coverage. They hunger for news exposure. Trump’s dominant presence in the news stemmed from the fact that his words and actions were ideally suited to journalists’ story needs. The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load. Both nominees tweeted heavily during the campaign but journalists monitored his tweets more closely. Both nominees delivered speech after speech on the campaign trail but journalists followed his speeches more intently. Trump met journalists’ story needs as no other presidential nominee in modern times.

In conclusion, journalism in America is basically all clickbait now.

sorry forgot the first two links

Perlstein's piece that Alfred linked to: Meet the Press: The hustlers, hucksters, hacks, and cowards who helped elect Donald Trump

The LGM mention of the Perlstein piece: A Disastrous Failure of the Press

(LGM also brought up the Kennedy Center study: The apotheosis of false equivalence)

is it the media's job to change minds tho? all i really want is tenacious reporting and a resistance at every turn the urge to take government and industry at their word, and to live in hope that honest reporting is in and of itself enough to help people think critically for themselves

of course there's very little money in investigative reporting, and very few reporters left who aren't reduced to desperately rewriting wire copy and press releases while chained to their desks 24/7. and the great work that people like fahrenholdt did over the course of the election ultimately amounted to fuck-all in the way of results, so i'm not exactly filled with enthusiasm for the future of honest reporting

perlstein's piece is booming and also crushingly depressing

I realize on one hand that the NYT is not the only rag in the business and that the complete failure of the media to inform the public was shared by nearly every news outlet over the past 12 months 24 months eight years two decades since 1991 or so, but on the other hand, if the NYT withered away and got bought out by RT or something, I'm honestly not sure what we would lose (I'm assuming Will Shortz gets picked up or goes into business for himself).

Also I have clicked on my TPM bookmark like 2 or 3 times since I signed up for TPM Prime. I didn't realize it at the time but I totally paid in so I can not read the news without guilt.

I think we'd lose a lot. Few newspapers have as many resources at the Times to do serious investigative reporting.

bitter LOL @ the idea of the NYT doing any "serious investigative reporting" whatsoever

I mean, god knows the times has done its share of stenography -- but an america without its paper of record would feel fully dystopian to me (in this scenario i am assuming wapo has folded too etc)

tbh the worst decision the newspaper industry ever made was to put their content on line for free and expect the magical money fairy to rain cash down on them at a later date (details still tbc even now)

now everyone gets their news for free, and while the democratisation of news has been good in some regards (eg on-the-ground reporting on social media in places like ferguson) it's also meant that bullshit gets passed around faster than at any ohter time in human history and it's vastly eroded the perception of the worth of solid reporting

TODAY
COLUMNISTS
All Columnists
Charles M. Blow M, Th
David Brooks Tu, F
Frank Bruni Su, W
Roger Cohen Tu, F
Gail Collins Th, Sa
Ross Douthat Su
Maureen Dowd Su
Thomas L. Friedman W
Nicholas Kristof Su, Th
Paul Krugman M, F
David Leonhardt Tu
Andrew Rosenthal

Treesh I'm not sure why you're throwing all the papers in the bin with the NYT, that's not the question or the point I was trying to make at all

tbh the worst decision the newspaper industry ever made was to put their content on line for free and expect the magical money fairy to rain cash down on them at a later date (details still tbc even now)

I remember the WSJ trying very hard to put their stuff behind a paywall circa 199whatever, and getting roundly mocked and excoriated for it. Even now they're by far the stingiest, and even yr avg ILX lefty is like "oh, shit, a paywall, can't someone please go get the copy and then paste it here?"

I get the physical times but my switch to digital. Kind of sucks having all that paper accumulate

Digital feels weird to pay for when you can erase your history and get 10 more free articles in perpetuity

xxp yeah, i'm as guilty of it as anyone for sure. afaik one of the very few paywalls which makes a decent amount of money is the financial times, which a) has a readership affluent enough to pay for it and b) provides enough unique content to its users in the form of market information etc to make it worthwhile.

when a good chunk of what you're paying to view on other sites is repurposed wire copy/news releases why would anyone choose to pay for it when it's free elsewhere? and it's a perfect self-defeating loop because less money means less to spend on reporting which means less unique content which means less subscribers...

(totally not trying to hijack into the eternally fun topic of, ppl who can simultaneously say "ARTISTS WHO HAVE GIVEN US SO MUCH JOY DESERVE A LIVING WAGE" as well as "hey can somebody rip this ace track for me plzthx" - it just kinda suggests itself)

right-click -> open link in incognito window will bypass all paywalls btw

i'm gonna get riskily super-reductive here and say a society could theoretically get by without music but it couldn't without an engaged and combative media

actually can i strike that from the record it's really not helpful to the discussion at hand

So, just for giggles, do we want this thing to continue to exist as a potential incremental step in saving the things we value? Or do we want to share tips on getting it for free? Or is there a third way of looking at it that I'm about to be told?

I'm currently at a lifetime high wrt paying for news media (NYT and WaPo subscriptions, daily FT and weekly Economist newsstand purchases).

at this point it feels vanishingly unlikely that there will be another serious-minded, paid-for news outlet which will find a sustainable audience from scratch so either we watch the last vestiges of a moderately competent press slip beneath the waves or we give established outlets our money and make it clear to them the reasons why we're doing it

my crossword-only NYT subscription couldn't be more transparent

We used to get the whole shebang, sunday magazine and all, and years ago we were just like "we read almost none of this and when we do it generally serves to insult our intelligence, also some of our money is helping Brooks and Friedman put food on the table and fuck that"

I actually had to ratchet back a little on print subscriptions recently, partly to accommodate simultaneous environmentalist feelz.

I've had dead-tree Washington Posts thudding solidly into the driveway since I was 5 years old. And I have probably owned five thousand books (conservative estimate). That probably amounts to a seriously large stand of forest felled purely for my reading pleasure.

I find I'm reading the physical paper less and less, so I finally I asked WaPo to go to Sat/Sun; otherwise I just read online.

bizarro OTM. I have my share of issues with all of the media I pay for, but they're big and generally headed in the right direction and if they're the last bulwarks against the impending tsunami of utter bullshit that seems to be forming across the globe, I'ma damn well support the hell out of them.

we might get a wapo sub again. I'm way more inclined to support them than the NYT (which is not "generally headed in the right direction" - I have no idea why anybody would even think that, frankly) but it's really, really hard to imagine giving Fred Hiatt any money at all.

I dunno, man, stuff like this week's photojournalism piece on Duterte's war on drugs seem pretty vital to me, all qualms aside.

i've worked in the public relations / communications industry for 12 years and currently i work in the higher education/scientific research sector. most of my time is spent writing up news releases about interesting stuff going on here which go out to the national and international news media. 95% of the time when they appear in print or online they're either my words verbatim or a modertaely edited version of the same.

it's moderately gratifying to me to see those stories being well-received but absolutely terrifying as someone who values good reporting to see how easy it is to get stuff reported as long as it makes some kind of sense and can be easily copy-and-pasted by someone working on a massively depleted newsdesk. how much else of the news pages is put together exactly the same way?

the flipside of that, which is even more alarming, is that occasionally i have to prepare statements in anticipation of the place i work for getting hauled over the coals in the press for (usually fairly minor) issues. again, 95% they never get used because no reporters ever find out about them. how much egregious shit is going unreported becuase there just aren't the reporters left to find out about it and do some digging?

how much egregious shit is going unreported becuase there just aren't the reporters left to find out about it and do some digging?

ZZZZZZZ Yeah yeah whatevs. Any tips on avoiding paywalls?

go to the newsstand, steal the newspaper of your choice

good baffler piece on the times' terrible public editor

https://t.co/H2vJxlErky

Ok yeah great, let's keep negging on the NYT for falling short of our ideal, that'll totally help support a robust press.

Falling short of our ideal? Uh okay

They're already bending over backwards to preserve access to the Trump administration by normalizing his behavior. They put Hillary's emails above the fold every chance they got. It's a spineless, equivocating rag and their political coverage helped elect a despot.

There's more than two newspapers in the country. If you must pay a print mag operating out of NYC there's always the daily news, FFS.

Okay so from Lehmann's piece:

at some point, the customer is not merely wrong, but actively undermining the social contract that permits a free press to operate in a formal democracy

And from Perlstein's piece:

The elite gatekeepers of our public discourse never bothered with context: that every Secretary of State since the invention of the internet had done the same thing, because the State Department’s computer systems have always been awful; that at the end of the administration of the nation’s 41st president a corrupt national archivist appointed by Ronald Reagan upon the recommendation of Dick Cheney signed a secret document giving George H.W. Bush personal, physical custody of the White House’s email backup tapes so they would never enter the public record.

I would guess that most people here generally agree with both those statements. But how on earth is yr averagely engaged citizen - let alone yr much-talked-about white male working-class Rust Belt voter - supposed to dip into this stream of opinionated commentary and come out with anything that informs their future voting behavior?

Do you think ANYONE reads this stuff, other than people who are already convinced of its rightness? The question is not how to change the minds of more media-saturated liberals. The question is how to change the minds of those who are currently outside the readership of the Baffler or Mother Jones (or whatever).

The question is what is a worthy enterprise that I want to support with my money. The one that puts EMAILGHAZI on the front page as regularly as possible and hires Liz Spayd to do any job, much less public editor, is not going to get my money.

let alone yr much-talked-about white male working-class Rust Belt voter

Don't care about him. I care about the people who decided to stay home because of the relentless negative coverage of Clinton non-scandals.

tombototm

It's hard for me to imagine anyone reading the times or the washington post seriously and then casting a vote for trump. They definitely weighted the emails too heavily in their coverage, but it was always made clear -- to my recollection -- that this paled in comparison to trumps various crimes. The people who were mislead by this coverage would have been headline exclusive readers and it's hard to inform that kind of voter

*misled

yeah the New York Times is like fifty-seven-millionth on my Naughty List this year