It is simply under-regulated readership.
Posted on 05/06/2009 1:35:39 AM PDT by MartinaMisc
'I SURE HOPE you'll be out of a job soon," e-mails a friend, alluding to The Boston Globe's current excruciations. He really is a friend - he has shown me and my family much warmth and kindness over the years - and should I find myself without a job, I'm sure he would want to help in any way he could. But such is his antipathy to the Globe that he regards my potential unemployment as a price well worth paying for what he calls the "greater good" of the newspaper's demise.
My friend is a conservative, and he is not alone in his views. To many on the right, the increasingly dire straits in which newspapers find themselves are something to cheer, or at any rate nothing to regret. The industry, they believe, is merely reaping in falling revenues and fleeing subscribers what it sowed in left-wing bias and unbalanced news coverage.
"Good riddance to bad trash," crows one conservative blogger, linking gleefully to Warren Buffett's forecast of "nearly unending losses" for US newspapers. "Good Riddance" is likewise James Srodes's message in the American Spectator, where he begins a column by "letting loose a small raspberry at the flood of hand-wringing going on over The Decline of the American Daily Newspaper." His disdain is echoed by readers, one of whom snorts: "Their pages are full of liberal tripe, lies about science and misbegotten theories of life. It's a wonder they sell any papers at all."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
+1
We used to get the Sunday WaPo plus the local rag. The WaPo just got too ridiculous, so we cancelled it. The local isn't all that bad and I need to know who died and that sort of thing.
I wonder if some of the online traffic is clicks from sites like FR (not that there ARE any other sites like this, but you know what I mean.) I have even gone to the Noo Yawk Slimes when an there was a link to a relevant article, but I wouldn't subscribe to the Slimes.....
3. Crappy reporting and writing. Many articles would earn less than a B for an eighth grader.
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That does it for me ... poor quality writing with no effort put forth to understand the subject...
When was the last time you read an article on a subject that you had great knowledge of and you came away thinking .. this writer gets it rather than “he’s clueless”.
Today's paper arrived soaking wet. Hopefully the replacement arrives before the wife wakes up.
If you wish to believe the rigged polls ( I do not ) the nation is split about 50-50, dem and pub...to produce a product that automatically alienates 50% of your potential customers is suicide...to not see this is a sign of mental illness
Reason why I don't subscribe to the daily fish-wrap is the spiking of important stories in order to cover up a member(s) of certain protected classes (Be it race or politician), MSM trying to shape their own perception into reality, AP bias, and covering up of authoritarian officials (Mostly dems) who our deemed “worthy” by press officials.
There is a nice sense of intimacy reading the paper with others, having conversations around the table about certain events, and going off to work/play that a computer screen/desk cannot duplicate. Laptops can be a pain to clean when the occasional coffee/OJ spill occurs.
>>>> It’s exactly the reason why I canceled the subscription to mine. <<<<<<
Most city newspapers are so far left that it’s like some kind of alternate reality.
Newspapers are failing because Craig’s List has taken their only major source of income and skimmed the best of the classified ads from the newspapers. The revenue model no longer supports all of the infrastructure and costs of running a newspaper.
Ditto. Perhaps putting an anti-gun pompous ass in charge of a newspaper in East Tennessee is not the smartest marketing decision. May its death come quickly.
As someone who worked in the newspaper industry for more than 30 years (but no longer), I do think liberal bias is at least somewhat of a contributor to the decline in newspapers. But there is another element besides the loss of ad revenue caused by the Internet age.
It is liberal bias that has dominated our educational system for years, and therefore into journalism. Liberal bias has promoted a learning atmosphere transfixed on social engineering, in addition to our children leaving school systems with pretty poor learning skills. Many have little or no reading comprehension, are incurious and can’t think critically. Why would they pick up a newspaper to read?
My kids grew up with newspaper all over our house. News was discussed and argued about. Now in their 20s they check in with our local paper via the Internet, but only occasionally pick up a newspaper in the towns where they live. My bet is they are probably some of the few kids who bother at all with print media, aside from the free music/entertainment publications strewn around urban areas.
The incurious nature of our print media reflects the incurious nature of the educational system they have promoted for years.
Liberal bias certainly is one factor ... and the reason I canceled my newspaper subscription.
Liberal bias is the reason we discontinued our subscription to the Atlanta newspaper. True, we had alternative news sources on the Internet, but years ago, we had an alternative news source on 24/7 news radio. This time, we just got sick of the increasingly blatant bias.
When we wrote our cancellation letter, we got repeated calls and emails from the paper offering us subscription deals. They simply refused to believe that we disliked their product because we found their viewpoint repulsive and offensive.
Keep whistling past the graveyard. Even your behemoth Goliath of lie-ber-al propaganda, the New York Times, will be chained and padlocked, foreclose notices plastered on it’s doors by the end of the year.
It is simply under-regulated readership.
The author is partially correct, but fails to think out of the box. Its true that craigs list has reduced revenues and that the internet has reduced readership, however, newspapers continue to echo the rest of the drive by media in their leftist approach to all subjects. The average person gets a dose of liberalism in the movies, on entertainment television, in the broadcasts news. People are starved for a more conservative slant to the news. Imagine if the newspapers had switched course and provided this conservative view. It couldn’t have hurt.
>> “Liberal bias isn’t killing newspapers”
It’s definitely a contributing factor. Admitting the bias, however, is something newsworthy.
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