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To: GOPcapitalist

Well .. this is the best news. The public is getting REALLY fed up with these biased people.


5 posted on 05/14/2004 10:47:16 AM PDT by CyberAnt (The 2004 Election is for the SOUL of AMERICA)
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To: CyberAnt
The public is getting REALLY fed up with these biased people.

Very true. The Chron's news penetration rates have been dropping recently even though they're the monopoly paper in town. The problem though is the fact that their profits do NOT depend on subscription numbers. I once heard Chronicle publisher Jack Sweeney himself admit this. They get their real money from advertisers, not newspaper sales, and they do it by jacking up the ad prices even while circulation and quality dip.

It's the classic case of the economist's lazy monopoly: by having relatively stable ad income the Chronicle is able to continue publishing without being accountable to reader preferences or complaints. So quality suffers. As quality suffers, disenchanted readers begin to substitute away to a competing news source such as the internet. That means the Chron's readership drops even further, but since readers provide no real revenue to them the loss of those readers will not induce "market efficiency," which in the newspaper world means better quality reporting.

In effect there are two real ways to shut the Chronicle down. One is to start a competitor paper that draws enough readers to make it a competitor with the chronicle for advertisor dollars. The other is to go after companies who advertise in the Chronicle itself and voice your dissproval to the corporate office much as many conservatives have done to sponsors of leftists like Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks.

13 posted on 05/14/2004 2:25:51 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
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