I would say a big part of the problem is reporters at newspaper chain of USAToday having to take one day of furlough a week while a top exec get $38 million as a send off.
How the heck can a newspaper survive with that kind of excess? How can any newspaper company with the kinds of financial trouble it finds itself in justify paying someone a multi million send off like that.
In my mind it is criminal.
One thing he failed to mention as perhaps the most critical element that contributed to the decline of print news was the heavy-handed liberalism that reached effortlessly from the editorial pages to the "news" pages. Is it any wonder normal Americans so easily abandoned print news and opinion when the kind of news and opinion they instinctively prefer could be easily accessed elsewhwere?
"Elsewhere", of course, was Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, followed by Fox News and, ultimately, the internet.
Sure, the abandonment of print news was likely destined to happen anyway, but the profound Democrat/liberal bias of the print news certainly hastened that abandonment. And naturally, advertising dollars followed the crowd.
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"I accept my share of the responsibility for placing the Times in this predicament," Martinez wrote. "But I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda ..."
- Andres Martinez (former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times)
Ping!
This is an interesting article, thank you for posting it.
He makes many good points, but I didn’t see him mention that journalists/reporters today ALWAYS put in their own biases. Sometimes subtly, sometimes with a sledgehammer to the side of my head. I don’t like it, in fact that dislike verges on hatred and that in turn makes me quit reading their articles and has lead to my boycotting more than one newspaper.
What I want are ACCURATE facts. If I want opinions from the writer he can post a separate article under the Opinion section.
-——Digital First and Print Last-—
Therein is the man’s problem. Print has no place. Print will no longer be.
In my neighborhood the number of yellow boxes to receive the news have steadily diminished as younger folks move in and do not read the newspaper. We have one for Sunday only. I do not read it daily but my wife does..... on line
The future is not the net or computers, the future is here..... smart phones. Info of all types will be (is)delivered by smart phone.
Friday I searched for HDMI cable on line. Yesterday and today when I went from Free Republic to the source article, there were big ads for HDMI cables along side the source piece. Why waste money on a bird cage liner when you can target specific products directly to the customer?
A friend of mine is the editor of our small town newspaper. He's always chirping about how the stock market is getting better and the economy is getting stronger and unemployment is going down. I just roll my eyes at him.
Interesting article but the author ignores some issues that lead to the decline of legacy media just because they have ignored them.
1) I just finished reading Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias.” In the book he points out how at the time he wrote the NYT column that destroyed his career (with truth) CBS News division _could_ have used the fallout from his column to OWN the ratings and bump to first place Rather than last of the big three. CBS found it easier to circle the wagons than to fix, or even recognize, the problem.
2) I read through the comments to date and saw little but glancing reference to the “truth problem.” The legacy media are overwhelmingly percieved as lying to the public. The author’s references to “brand” as a marketing tool don’t help when the brand is held in lower esteem than a used-car salesman in a cheap polyester suit.