Posted on 09/17/2012 6:11:36 AM PDT by DManA
The small frontier papers definitely depended upon government ads and printing government docs and such
thanks for the interesting reading material, got any more?? lol.
One of the news history books I read a year or so ago made the point that Democrat-aligned newspapers during reconstruction benefited greatly from government patronage at the local level - counties, towns, etc. GOP newspapers could never crack that revenue nut.
This enabled the Democrat papers to outlast the ‘carpetbagger’ Republican newspapers that tried to come in, and in turn helped keep the South solidly Democrat.
That sounds logical. I bet its right on the money too
He used stimulous money to buy of MSNBC. They are all pawing at the US treasury for a bail out in his second term.
“If the newspaper owners could figure out how to market their product electronically, they would be fine.”
The real problem is that newspapers use to own a local market monopoly on daily information exchange. There was a single giant printing press at the center of each distribution area, and ad sellers and ad consumers had only a single place to go. Newspapers could set their ad prices arbitrarily high, and they did.
With the advent of the Internet, that monopoly is dead forever. The cost to buy and sell ads approaches zero, the cost to distribute approaches zero, the pages to place ads approaches infinity, and the readership approaches infinity.
Moving everything online at this point simply means a former newspaper is nothing more than one more of a billion web sites that advertisers can choose from and pay tiny fractions of a cent per ad. No way to make up the monopoly revenue lost through print publishing. Not only that, the online ad train has already left the station over 10 years ago anyway. Why would any advertiser PAY to advertise on some newspaper web site when they can get free ads on craigslist, which has already achieved critical mass among buyers and sellers as the only place to go for hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers. Likewise, who needs local classifies when you can sell your stuff directly to the universe on ebay? And then there is google soaking up the rest of ad revenue.
Print publishers are dead and cannot be resurrected online, at least in terms of their former revenue level. And quite frankly, that’s a good thing as most of them are anti-American, Commie pieces of crap and deserve to die.
“Two weeks ago I canceled my subscription to the Wall Street Journal...$455 a year is just too much for a paper that won’t vigorously defend capitalism in this age of Obamanomics.”
Yeah, I subscribed to the journal for decades, but it just got too pricy, particularly since there are so many free alternatives online.
At one time, I would have been willing to pay $99.00/year for a print subscription to the journal, but now I don’t think even that low price would entice me: I’ve gotten too use to getting my news online from dozens of different sources.
“people using the DVR to skip the commercials”
Which I do as well. And with FireFox, you can use the Adblock Plus addon to nuke most online ads. Years ago I would click an occasional google ad, but never bought anything because most of those advertising had poor prices, poor selection, and poor terms. I quickly realized there was a reason they had to advertise to appear on the first page of a google search!
I can believe it about the shoppers. After all, what else are you going to read at Wendy’s while you eat your chili?
But I’m not sure you’re right about the suburban dailies. I think most have now been bought up by two or three big (ultra liberal) media corporations and most of what’s in them is simply the same liberal garbage copied from their bigger cousins in the capital cities. That’s certainly the case with the suburban dailies around here. They’ve also shrunk to just a few pages, with very little advertising and their circulation is rapidly decreasing as well. And shrinking advertising and shrinking circulation is the ultimate death spiral for a daily.
“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.”
Don’t forget obits. The locals STILL have a monopoly on obits, and boy did they jack the rates through the roof for those! I’d love to see a national legals and obituary website arise akin to craigslist, but charging a small fee to ensure the information remains published as a matter of record “forever”. If such a site could gain a gain critical mass like craigslist or ebay has, then it would finish off the dailies. And provide cheaper and MUCH better obits!
Many funeral homes now publish obits on their websites. Once folks get into the habit of browsing those sites (just like many folks turn to the newspaper obit page first thing every morning) that revenue stream will also go away.
We have the technology to track how well each add works, and they prices they can command have dropped as well. These ad revenues are what pays for TV. As they drop (and they will drop more), the quality and quantity of shows will drop also.
You can already see it in movies. The majority of movies are remakes or sequels, and even they are reaching the saturation point.
My sister says she expects a crash in the entertainment economy soon.
As I read your little piece of history, I said to myself, “Hey—carlo goes back to before Hizzoner.”
Then I saw your story about the coverage of Uncle Joe and knew it was so.
I remember the Kennelley days, just barely.
This is the key point. Also, ads can be more selectively targeted with online than with "broadcast" - TV, newspapers, radio, etc.
I fondly remember a class trip to our local rag. It was in the middle of town, a four-story building (with wooden floors, IIRC) and a basement that held the tall presses that extended up into a first floor atrium.
They composed most of the text in Linotypes, with open gas flames heating up the lead pots for the type slugs; one of the wonders of the mechanical age.
They'd take a blocked-up page (with text and halftone blocks) and emboss a sheet of heavy paper with it. Then, they'd curve the paper to a radius of about two feet in a molding jig, fill it with hot lead, and get out a curved plate for the giant press cylinders. Of course, they'd make dozens of plates for a single issue, and a single press would print something like 16 pages at a time on the wide paper stock.
And then the presses themselves...mechanical leviathans, running hundreds of copies a minute, the printed paper flying through live flame drying its ink in an instant, and then on the slitting, folding, and collating mechanisms, which were actually the most fascinatingly complex part.
It was geek heaven, in its day.
As my namesake believed, printer's ink was the elixir of the Reformation.
It wasn’t always the case.
Time magazine was once a conservative weekly (back when it cost $.25.)
WSJ still is for the most part.
When we lived in Prior Lake, MN., the PL paper was a straight news daily. Of course anything would be an improvement on the Mpls Strib.
Those big ultra lib holding companies are having fire sales on their recent acquisitions.
Someone who is smart and a good writer will buy one at a fire sale price and do well.
Indeed, I am an ole fool.. I grew up in Daley’s 11 ward neighborhood, with his sons, little Richie, and tiny Bill.. I can recall when Richard J, won the City Clerk election before becoming Mayor for life..
Actually, Kennelly, and Kelly before him were even more corrupt then Daley, if that is even possible.. Yea, I go back a long way.. :)
Seeing these wondrous behemoths silenced and cut up for scrap metal is indeed quite sad. It’s not sad though to see the cessation of the steady stream of lies that poured forth from them at the end.
“My sister says she expects a crash in the entertainment economy soon. “
And quite frankly that will be a good thing. It would have to lead to mostly paid entertainment, which means that the entertainment producers would have to make products that consumers would be willing to buy and would have to compete in a marketplace against each other. This should reduce the propaganda content of “entertainment” and increase its entertainment quality. Producers will have to cater to their customers desires in order to stay in business, instead of producing reams of low-quality dreck propaganda shoveled out for “free” (paid with advertising.) Maybe even it will thin the herd of elitist, self-righteous, ignorant,m know-it-all “progressive” “stars”.
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