Posted on 04/25/2013 12:46:31 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Could be. But 1) even the suburbs of Chicago and Los Angeles are pretty liberal nowadays, and 2) newspapers know how to draw in yuppie types in the cities (more or less) and how to sell to them. Suburbanites, who don't need all that art and restaurant coverage are a harder sell. What can print give them that the Internet can't?
The problem with urban areas is the cost of living is extraordinarily high. Made so in no small part by their leftist politics. The sad thing is its all unnecessary with modern information technology, more and more of the “informed class” should not have to commute at all and should be able to live almost anywhere they want.
I think the reason we been seeing urbanization is the cost of energy and the youthful desire for night life, as well as the limit fruits of urban renewal after urban collapse.
The point is if the author is right this renewal will be short lived as leftist politics again drive the city into self-destructive corruption and with it the population out to the subbergs (or with respect to new communication technology) the country side.
Some advertisers sell very few big ticket items; those would be looking for a more rich elitist liberal base.
Other advertisers sell a plethora of low-priced items. They would be targeting a more lower to middle class base.
A newspaper that wants to survive in the real world always has the option of depending on the latter type of advertising and not the former.
College students are not rich, but there's a reason so many businesses set up in college towns--because, as a group, even poverty-stricken college kids have a lot of money.
I don’t think there is anything inevitable about newspapers (or any media) being liberal.
We only have to understand that McCarthy was right—there was a major effort to place communists in key places in our media. Those original communists are probably gone, but the staffs on hand were selected and trained by them. Want a more balanced/conservative media? The owners of the newspaper can set up an editorial board who will send any articles back for rewrites if they show bias. They can instruct reporters to cover the stories the liberal media typically shoves into the back pages, and move those stories to the front. Any staff that can’t manage to write unbiased stories can be replaced. There are plenty of ways to fight back, for someone determined to turn a newspaper around.
I live in a small city. I would love to be able to subscribe to a very conservative physical news paper to hold in my hand, to read at the coffee shop and to spoon feed me the conservative bent on news and events. I would pay for that.
I would like to have a newspaper tell me the skin color of perps committing crimes instead of making me assume they are black and hispanic when they refuse to mention it.
I would like to have a newpaper that accurately calls terrorists, “Islamic terrorists”.
I would love to have a newpaper that would reveal the dirty little secrets of both Democrat and Republican politicians.
It will never happen.
I do hope the Koch brothers buy up some papers. We really need news from the conservative viewpoint, whether the subscription is paper or for a tablet.
This has the MSM absolutely terrified. They are terrified of losing their monopoly over the propaganda trade. TERRIFIED.
We need to organize demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns in support of the Koch brothers.
There are successful conservative newspapers in cities, but they are usually the scrappy local underdogs to the big mainstream dailies bought by the plurality of the regional paper-buying population. Think: The Boston Herald (conservative) versus The Boston Globe. The New York Post (conservative) versus the New York Times and Daily News. The Washington Times (conservative) versus the Washington Post.
...
The Koch brothers could try to make the Los Angeles Times or the Baltimore Sun more appealing to a different intellectual community. But if they were to buy the papers and push their newsrooms in a more conservative direction, I suspect they would see an increase in the pace at which the geographic communities that once sustained the publications abandon them.
She's saying they'd lose the giant share of the Times circulation if they took it rightward and wouldn't find enough new readers to make up for that.
She's wrong if she thinks it's about minorities and immigrants, though. It's the well-off, largely White liberal audience that supports the papers and the papers cater to.
In places like New York and Los Angeles, the well-to-do trendy types advertisers look for are overwhelmingly liberal.
The relevance here is that if the LA Times loses the the affluent yuppie types retailers target its circulation and profits go down, and increased circulation among Los Angeles's remaining conservatives won't compensate for those financial losses.
The Times still turns a profit now (barely). If the Kochs take it in a conservative direction there's no guarantee that it would better the paper's financial condition, given what LA has become, and they'd have to make good the losses. But who knows? If you have the money, you can take the risk.
The Kochs could influence Times readers in subtle ways, making them more open to libertarian thinking while not challenging their lifestyle choices. That may be what LA progressives fear. If it plays out that way, the results would be a mixed bag for traditional conservatives: more libertarian sentiment in economics, but also less support for traditional social values.
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