are having trouble find advertisers and subscribers? Breaks my heart.
Posted on 09/17/2012 6:11:36 AM PDT by DManA
The transition would have occurred anyway, but because of their own behaviour, the print media created a cliff where a slope would have been.”
This is precisely my theory as well. What little credibility the press had after the 1992 election was lost in the 2008 election. The difference between 1991 and 2007 is that in 2007, people had alternatives.
Ah, like the tax on cars to subsidize the buggy-whip industry?
I dont think the free local weeklies are dead. There is a big market for local paper and advertising.
are having trouble find advertisers and subscribers? Breaks my heart.
You’re right. Shoppers are going strong.
Also daily papers in suburbs don’t have a marketing problem.
Might help cable news but it won't help newspapers. They are a business model coming to an end. The only hope they have is for a SHTF scenario. Then maybe they will come back.
The old media is bleeding to death and they shoot themselves in the foot.
“Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
Fewer and fewer barrels......
When the newspaper industry saw consolidations and failures that made most metropolitan cities go from more than one local newspaper to one-newspaper towns, it was expected that profits would magically rise forever under monopoly conditions.
The first thing the new monopolists did in most areas was to go to their largest advertisers such as car dealers, furniture stores, and department stores and raise their rates. The adverstisers rebelled and found other, cheaper means of advertising including throw-aways, neighborhood papers and TV.
Look at your local paper now; it’s so skinny that there is hardly enough for covering the bottom of a bird cage.
You are so right. Over the weekend I was channel surfing and came across GMC Channel. They are running the series Touched By an Angel. I remember my wife and kids and I watching, and loving the show. So great to see it again. I began to wonder, in this age of everything gay and sexual subtext, how such a show would fare again (given the opportunity). A network in dire straits would do well to launch such Sunday evening entertainment again.
It will never happen.
If someone launched a conservative channel with shows like that, it would probably not get picked up by cable systems and then there would be a leftist outcry about its bias if it did and boycotts of sponsors.
you mean like Glen Beck’s TV station?
channel 212?
which the MSM is working overtime to ignore?
When the two-paper cities began becoming one paper cities I thought a good idea would be for the second paper to either shrink or even become a tabloid. They might have found a niche instead of trying to be a clone of the bigger paper.
Imagine a thinner paper with a conservative editorial page focusing mostly on local news and issues with a small staff. Sort of like a small town daily in a big city, it’s circulation wouldn’t have to be nearly as big as the other to stay afloat.
But they all wanted to be the NY Times or Wash Post.
I don’t have Direct TV or whatever its on, I’m sure it won’t last too long. He’ll say something that is twisted out of shape and they’ll be protests and it’ll be dropped.
There's always been crooks - but I'm old enough to remember when most members of the press were honorable...
There's always been crooks - but I'm old enough to remember when most members of the press were honorable...Now? Nothing would surprise me.
There is still this body of thought out there that if a newspaper becomes “local” only, they can actually turn a profit.
After watching the “local” papers up close for over three years and sitting next to their “reporters” in town meetings, I can tell you they are not faring much better than the big metro papers.
The ONLY thing that’s keeping the local weeklies and small town dailies from folding is the money they get from government in the form of legal ads. Which is a direct subsidy, in this day and time of the internet and government websites.
Take that away from them, and they dry up and blow away.
Sounds like the papers of the 1850’s
There were proposals of a government voucher to subscribe t newspapers. It’s pretty disturbing.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/jesse.shapiro/research/PoliticalInfluence.pdf
Do Newspapers Serve the State? Incumbent Party Influence on the US Press, 1869-1928
Historians have documented a number of channels by which incumbent parties used the machinery of the state to benefit sympathetic newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most important were contracts to print government documents (records of legislative proceedings, official forms, notices, laws, and so forth); these contracts were often allocated at inflated prices to papers affiliated with the party in power (Baldasty 1992, 21; Abbott 2004, 45; Summers 1994, 48, 54, 60, 210-214).
In a detailed study of Wisconsin newspapers from 1849-1860, Dyer (1989) shows that such contracts from the state government accounted for roughly half of the revenue of large party newspapers in the state capital, and ten to twenty percent of the revenue of smaller English-language papers near the frontier (29-31). Abbott (2004) similarly finds that printing patronage was the “most important” revenue source for many papers throughout the South (45).
I’d like to see the raw numbers, just to make sure that the claim of “adjusted for inflation” is indeed accurate.
Inflation is one of those real “bitches” that can sneak up on you. For example between the time I started to work at my last company in 1984 and when I left, my salary “nearly doubled”, yet when I checked it with the inflation calculator I was stunned. I hadn’t gained at all when compared to 1984 dollars. I had gone down by a couple of thousand and my taxes had climbed because I was in a much higher tax bracket.
But dollar wise I had done very well for myself. Too bad it wasn’t still in 1984 dollars.
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