The NYT has announced that it’s cutting 500 jobs from its different operations (which are more diverse than just the paper you think of). This amounts to 4% of its overall labor force.
Why?
Because they have fewer readers and fewer profits and so can sustain fewer workers.
Over at Powerline John Hinderaker offers this:
As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the
industry’s current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based
commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our
commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et
al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency,
which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider:
stop being so liberal. Wouldn’t you think that with newspapers nearly
everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether
its readers–or former readers–were trying to tell it something? Like,
we’re not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for
being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the
Democratic Party.Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial
bleeding? It’s hard to say for sure. But don’t you think that if they
were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal
papers might try it? [SOURCE.]
I agree that stopping being so liberal would help the situation of the major newspapers, and that they’d try it if they were motivated by purely economic considerations, but I don’t think it would fix the situation.
Why?
‘Cause I think newspapers are losing their market for reasons independent of the fact that their political ideology is driving readers away.
Personally, I have no interest in reading newspapers. None. I don’t need any more paper piling up around my house, thankyew. I don’t need burglars knowing that I’m not at home because my sloppy, distracted paperboy keeps throwing papers when I’m out of town. I don’t need anything that the papers have to offer.
Not when I can get it all online.
I can get my news online, read comics online, print coupons online, check movie times online, go to eBay instead of the classifieds. Anything! I can get all of my newspaper-type business done online far faster, cheaper, and more conveniently.
It’s the same reason I don’t watch TV news (except for rare exceptions for major national events like after 9/11 or a presidential election).
If I can get my standard information needs fulfilled online–for free–anytime I want them, then why should I even bother with television, much less something as klunky as a newspaper.
As more people are brought up in the fourth age of human communications, it will be harder and harder for newspapers to have a go of it.
I suspect that they will always exist. There will be a few big ones, probably on the model of USA Today, and there will be lots of little, tiny, local papers, like the weeklies that exist principally to run classified ads and that do a few stories on the side.
But I suspect that within a generation the middle level of papers will simply be gone.
They’ll be yesterday’s news.
What will emerge in their places, I’m not sure. Blogs will be a big part of the picture, but not all of it. Probably the broadcast media will have web sites that provide news, on the model of FOXnews.com or CNN.com.
I’m dubious, though, whether anybody will be able to put together a for-pay online newspaper, not when you have newsgatherers like the broadcast networks wanting to involve people with their web sites so that they can involve them with their TV channels.
The quality of news coverage may suffer, at least for a while.
Ultimately, though, the Internet will serve as a net knowledge gain for society, not a net knowledge loss.
That’s what the fourth age is all about.
While being liberal doesn’t help the newspapers much, their economic troubles are quite easy to figure out. As Rush would say, follow the money. Subscriptions are not a significant source of revenue. Home delivery on weekdays is actually a loser. Sunday is when the carriers actually make money. A couple decades ago, subscriptions would be a significant source of revenue. So, when you think newspaper, instead think advertiser.
The purpose of an advertiser is to get you to look through the pretty ads. Hence, USA Today is written at a 4th-grade level with lots of pictures. You very rarely see it cause controversy. You are seeing television covered a lot more in newspapers. The same problem is happening with the weeklies where Newsweek recently combined two weeks into one due to weak advertising. The sad truth is that there a very few people willing to pay for political news. Those that are willing to pay, aren’t looking for 800-word summaries.
Death to the old media!
Long live the new media!
I used to be a newspaper junky until I realized just how bad the coverage was in them. For a brief time I found a newspaper that was actually worth reading, but then they changed editors and the quality noticeably went downhill. I also much prefer the internet for the selection and quality of news, opinions etc. available. I also hardly watch TV anymore either. The internet is so much more interesting.
I love not having to put up with TV news “teasers” anymore. Ya know: “Is there a murderer walking around in your neighborhood? We’ll tell you later…”
As for newspapers, I find their news is dated by the time it gets to press.
Mr. Forrest’s point about subscriptions is accurate. The money that gets is mostly to cover distribution costs. Advertisers is where the money is.
That’s why I think online-newspapers will not need to be subscription based but will be able to remain free indefinitely, even if their paper versions go out of business. They won’t have significant distribution costs. Right now, advertisers are hesitant to advertise online. Some of this can be attributed to their foolish advertising during the dot-Com bust but it can also be attributed to the market still being young and advertisers are unsure how successful advertising online can be. Once the market is better defined, advertisers will be paying more to advertise online and that will be the revenue that pays for the service.
That’s my thought anyway.
Jimmy,
Out of curiosity, what are the sites you visit for your news?
There are still a few things I like better about newspapers —
1) You can take them into the bathroom. A laptop is a lot less practical.
2) Crossword puzzles and Sudoku.
3) They aren’t shining tiny lights at my eyes all the time that give me headaches. I usually end up printing out online articles of any length because of this problem.
I wonder if part of the reason the times is laying off operations people has to do with technology. When I worked at a newspaper, the company laid off more than 4 percent of its operations staff because we didn’t them any more. They used to lay every article out on the page physically, involving a lot of trial and error in piecing things together. To make matters worse, sometimes someone would lose one of the pieces of a story or maybe an ad, or maybe just put the wrong thing on the page by mistake.
Once the WYSIWYG layout programs became use-friendly enough, it became far more practical to layout pages on-screen. It took less time, fewer people AND resulted in fewer errors.
I only get the newspaper to read the comics. Maybe there-in lies the problem for the NYT.
The New York Times? Oh, yeah — the paper with the crossword puzzle. (I don’t bother with the rest.)
‘thann