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

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

(still naughty though!)

I want to hear more about this universe of straw man trump voters who don't read the NYT and yet are also the reason why we should still support the NYT

Because without the journalistic services provided by the times and similar outlets even we -- the ilx elite -- wouldnt have been well informed this election season

(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)

― troops in djibouti (Ye Mad Puffin)

i have also been known to turn the ac on in october, clearly i don't _really_ care about the environment

liz spayd is terrible at her job in a way that only fuels normalization of trump's worst tendencies. she recently argued that reporters should be more sympathetic to people who act racist yet don't think they're racist. her constituency is this weird amalgam of market forces and moldy ideas of "objectivity," a fact that's only made worse by her puny intellect.

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.

Which makes me wonder: how many people under, say, 25 have any conception of "editorial" as separated from "reported news"?

under, say 45

this is awesome. a friend of mine posted it online. her dad was the editor of the daily news at the time and he is great in this. so funny. he was editor during the height of my love for the new york daily news. anyway, this is quite the roundtable:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?7046-1/whos-journalist-talk-show-sensationalism

http://www.splc.org/article/2016/12/missing-a-review-of-newspaper-theft-and-vandalism-at-colleges-across-the-country

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-america

Teen Vogue blowing up the spot

Key sentence:

The President of the United States cannot be lying to the American electorate with zero accountability.

I'm happy that Teen Vogue is willing to go there. No snark intended, but I really hope we don't have to rely solely on Teen Vogue to be the vanguard of the media pushback.

Not even respectable as packing material imho

https://mobile.twitter.com/mattmfm/status/807685349195522048

https://mobile.twitter.com/AJentleson/status/807443174344036352

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/12/11/the-news-media-is-good-for-what-exactly/

uuuuugh

pretty obvious that that letter writer was being ironic when he made it seem like internment was like a job. dumb letter regardless, obv

If we're talking about the decline of the newspaper industry in combination with how hard it will become for 'trad. media' to do their jobs under Trump, and track the many mistakes they make, I'd suggest following Jay Rosen on twitter. This from last night is pretty on point imho: 'Winter is coming: what it will be like for the press under Trump'

hate to be this guy but it sort of...says...something...that many of the people who are most vocal about the lack of good investigative reporting and how they're going to cancel their NYT subscriptions are also the ones who (seemingly unironically?) are promoting this dumb teen vogue op-ed that features no original reporting

I don't know what it says, maybe I need to meet some many of the people

seems like people don't want investigative reporting as much as they want to see their worldview faithfully represented in the media

OK, that's a little clearer. I'm sure for the majority of people that's the case, as about a bazillion studies of online behavior and preferences have shown. Didn't know the NYT had the monopoly on "investigative reporting" though. Will have to dig into that.

NYT doesn't have a monopoly; no one is claiming that it does.

But many hundreds of newspapers are still technically "publishing" while doing almost nothing that even resembles traditional journalism. This coast-to-coast hollowing-out of what was once a pretty robust ecosystem is disheartening. The NYT may blow dead bears at doing its job, but it is one of very few outlets that are even trying.

thanks gannett, thanks tronc, thanks wall street

i buy the PAPER nyt 3x a week (incl Sunday, total $10) and can forage one daily off subway seats if i gotta

"many of the people who are most vocal about the lack of good investigative reporting and how they're going to cancel their NYT subscriptions are also the ones who (seemingly unironically?) are promoting this dumb teen vogue op-ed that features no original reporting"

I'd like to see some data, please. some numbers telling us how many people who say they are going to cancel their NYT subscriptions are also sharing this Teen Vogue editorial. 2 of your Facebook friends? 3? We demand facts.

that "dumb teen vogue op-ed" may not be the sine qua non of courageous journalism, but it makes its point well and it was a point well worth making.

and anna wintour, who is artistic director for teen vogue parent condé nast, met with trump this morning. so...