Hatchet Man
Cutting jobs with a meat cleaver
Posted on 10/30/2008 7:13:32 AM PDT by My Favorite Headache
With the news business going through continual layoffs and cutbacks in news coverage, where are we going to get our liberal worldview from?
There last best hope is the Obama bailout.
This is nothing. We are headed for a recession similar to the 70’s and early 80’s.
If they are already laying off, it’s clear most of these companies won’t survive.
Print ad response rates are pathetic. They are first thing to go out the window in most marketing depts.
As long as they keep up their liberalism, they are going down. First: conservatives can read and we don't like what you are saying. Second: your liberals are just too ignorant to be able to decipher what you are dishing out, others never read anything only follow the bouncing ball, just give them a bone.
When you keep doing the same thing over and over and get no profit, it's time to rethink or go down the tubes.
Exactly. How long before we start seeing an outcry that, say, the New York Times is too important to fail? I only skimmed the article, but the Times Company's bonds were recently downgraded to junk, and my money guy estimates their one year target price per share is $8. They were at $45 in 2004.
Meanwhile, Associated Press is losing a lot of papers, especially heartland papers, thanks to its combination of new all-advocacy journalism (a slant in every story!) and new pricing.
In a very amusing twist, the LA Times layoffs fell heavily on underperforming affirmative-action hires. Sorry about that... no. Not really.
I don't know if the article mentioned the Christian Science Monitor -- a once noble paper, collapsed in a seething cauldron of Boston liberalism over the last forty years, beginning with a one-sided slant on gun rights -- completely ceased publication and has gone web-only. (Yes, I really should have read TFA more carefully).
Of course, the sad part of this is along with the newsroom staff, who are all effete liberals, the collapse of the industry puts a lot of good decent production folks out of work. Most Freepers would probably really like and get along with the pressroom staff and the techno-geeks -- the former tend to be conservative (lots of vets) and the latter libertarian. The newsrooms, well, that's where you go if four years of state college English went to your head.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Printing anything for distribution is becoming obsolete. Going the way of buggy whips. Within ten years it will be all network. The new White Space broadband proposal will hasten the end.
Burn baby burn — Cancel all your subscriptions to everything, bring it on faster. Save the trees — Have you ever wondered why the enviro-whackos never go after that angle?
For a while at least, you will still have CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.
Well, I do declare Happy Days Are here Again......
When they cater to their elites, bias all the time, refuse to dig out the real news and ignore us conservatives, what can I say? We buy maybe two papers a year and then for the coupons and discounts. Our local, family, fair and balanced,weekly newspaper is not included in this.
Good news. Do all you can do to facilitate it.
and under ‘bama’s plan, those job cuts will spread everywhere.
we need to email our “regulars” and tell them:
“We’d win a lot more of the 40% that “don’t pay taxes but would get a check’ if we said: “they’re going to need that check because, under ‘bama’s plan, their jobs will be the first to go when small businesses have to start cutting back.”
Right now, all they hear is that they will “get a check” = that encourages them to vote for ‘bama.
WAKE UP! Remind them that it’s Small Business that have provided 100% of the jobs in the past few years.
If they get punished with higher taxes, they will have to lay off and not hire. That means the famous “40%” will be the first to see their jobs disappear. A small check won’t make up for no paycheck.
In addition, for those who DO manage to keep their jobs, the chance to advance and make more money over the years will shrink as less jobs means they tread water at the level they’re at now.
So, do they want a job security and the opportunity to advance or a frozen job to no job in exchange for ‘a small check’?”
Right now, our mantra is “40% will get a CHECK!” That’s a great incentive for most of them to vote for ‘bama. DUH!
I just sent the above to:
and the McC/Sarah campaign at:
info@McCainPalinVictory2008.com
and deputy campaign manager
and copy/paste to Huck at:
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=SignUp.Home
Remember the formula of the networks: The office people that screen the emails only pass them on when they get X-amount on a given subject.
Be sure to add your name and town and email - or they won’t read them.
IMPORTANT when emailing. they won’t read mass emails - SO,
put just one email add in the “to” line then click on BBC at the end of that line. a BCC line will open just above subject line. copy paste the rest of the addresses in there and each recipient will see ONLY their name - and in the subject line make reference to “about that 40%” or something that includes the 40%
The Newspaper industry is in a Depression as the economy weeds out excess capacity. They have left at least 50% of their readers (conservative) in the dust by gutting all objectivity and going ultra left. In shrinking the font or print size legible only with the aid of a magnifying glass they are doing their best to remove 65% of their readers (60 years plus). No other industry has done more to shrink their audience. Add alternative sources and the outcome is obvious.
That’s what happens when media outlets are obsessed with one sided stories. They lose at least half their audience.
The only value these papers have now is their ability to distribute advertising. When companies like Target, Best Buy, KMart, Sears and other retailers figure out how to get their flyers to people cheaper than the papers, there will be virtually no revenue coming into them.
One of these days, you’ll see one of the big chains move from a hard copy distribution to an electronic distribution. When they start collecting email addresses at their stores, you’ll know the end is near for newspapers.
Local newspapers will still exist for local stories, obits, sports, and other specialty stories. But that will only be available online- and it might even be a subscription service, as advertisers continue to look elsewhere.
Articles like this give me a tingle up my leg.
Thanks for the thrill.
Cutting jobs with a meat cleaver
NYT Chart at Yahoo.com (and I see their analyst is now saying $8, too). You ought to read this just for the joy of it. And here's Reuters this week tut-tutting over Standard and Poor's decision to downgrade NYT paper to junk. ("The outlook is negative," too, which means more downgrades are probably coming... NYT.N is already three notches below investment grade, and they have to pay hundreds of thousands in insurance now to issue bonds). What's Doctor Raoul's old saying? Is he still around? I'll ping him.
The CSM throws in the towel. Their story. Bonus: The Washington Post says this could be the first of many. From their pages to God's eyes!
The paper was founded by a weird pseudochristian cult which rejects medical science -- they're in the news from time to time when they force their kids to die of appendicitis or flu instead of get treatment. Gun control has been a signature issue for the doomed newspaper since the 1960s... any book on the subject, the antigun position has numerous footnotes to the CSM. Here's one example from 2003: "Surely the right to keep and bear arms, outside a militia, shouldn't include Uzis, AK-47s, and similar assault weapons."
On the LA Times affirmative-action purge, best source (as always on LAT) is LA Observed. The article cited is only one of many on these richly deserved layoffs... not that there aren't staffers remaining (white staffers!) who deserved the chop much more. Actually, the Times purge seems to have gone to the demographic ends of the newsroom, retiring both young (unproductive) novices and old (highly-paid and unproductive for the money) geezers.
What do you call a newpaperman in LA?
..."Waiter!" Heh.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Yep. It's a really, really stupid business move to alienate half (or more) of your potential customers.
Here's a great example from Gannett last year -- an Alabama paper so cash-strapped that they had to disinvite three summer interns in a minority journalism program, who were already on the way, at the very last minute. See here. The Montgomery (AL) Advertiser is a paper with a hard-left editorial stance (staffers angling for those disappearing jobs in New York and LA without regard to their readership, apparently). Naturally they endorsed Saint Hussein this year, and Kerry in 2004. Also naturally, their ABC circulation is lower in 2008 than it was when they couldn't support their promise to three college kids in 2007, when it was lower than it was in 2004.
Hot tip, people: Outside of newsrooms, Alabama is not a hotbed of liberalism. Black or white, Alabamans tend to be family-values patriots.
Our local, family, fair and balanced,weekly newspaper is not included in this
Local papers have the best chance at surviving -- with local contant and advertising. But many things threaten even them. What dooms many small papers is being bought by a Gannett or McClatchy. Editorial and business people from the same old cities and same old schools breeze in and "improve" the paper to blandness.
Apart from bias, the newspaper industry is being rocked by other things:
But, there's an important difference. Those three things are out of a paper's management's control. Bias is not. But they would rather stay biased than survive. Even if they are the Montgomery Advertiser showering the good folk of Alabama with Greenwich Village values like a drunk urinating on his fellows in a homeless shelter.
There are good people in the industry. They do not have their hands on the tiller, and so their only choice is to man the lifeboats or hit the rocks.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.