Posted on 03/18/2006 11:02:48 PM PST by MRMEAN
Recent events in the newspaper business make it clear that newsrooms cannot escape market forces.
Stockholders forced the sale of Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper chain, with 32 papers. McClatchy Co. announced Monday it would buy Knight Ridder, but said it would sell 12 of the 32 newspapers -- the ones not making enough money and not in growth markets.
And Post editors announced March 10 that the newsroom will cut 80 of 870 newsroom positions. The New York Times, located in the world's financial center, announced on Tuesday that it will stop publishing daily stock listings.
Advertising revenue has fallen at most newspapers because of mergers of major retailers, lagging auto sales, the bankruptcies of major advertisers and a shift of classified ads to free Web sites such as Craigslist. Declining circulation and the defection of young readers to the Internet mean that newspapers can't raise their advertising rates year after year.
Newspapers are part of the civic glue that holds communities together. The turnover in newspaper ownership has been staggering to cities that wake up to find their newspaper sold and to employees who thought their jobs were safe. The Post, like most big-city dailies, has lost circulation -- a nearly 7 percent drop since 2003 -- and advertising revenue has been flat while expenses have risen, so The Post is trimming its budget sails. Newspaper journalism is labor-intensive and expensive; the two big costs are people and paper.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The disgusting collection of self important elitists that you call journalists are incapable of connecting with the majority.
In their dreams -- you can't tie together a city or region if half your audience, conservatives, stopped reading you years ago because of your contempt for and ignorance of them.
I will give the author credit for noting the impact of online ad sites such as Craigslist. It's doubtful that many of the "name" reporters have realized that yet.
.
.....makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
Dinosaur, meet asteroid.
and tore American civilization apart.
We might be missing the fact that we feed off the news generated by all these boots. The cheering for the demise of newspapers is misplaced. They are the source. The rest of us, including TV, mostly just comment upon it, and repeat it.
Sorry, they don't "hold" the conservative community together - and the classic liberal victim groups don't buy enough papers to keep the system going. Papers downplay information we need to make our lives better while endlessly trumpeting liberal BS. It's tiresome.
The implication is that before the invention of the printing press, communities were somehow held together less strongly.
I really doubt that.
That's a pretty rare admission from the dean of a journalism school.
There's one big intangible in all this: a paper's connection with its readers. Readers who feel respected and who love their newspaper don't depart easily. If Post journalists write every story, take every photo, compose every headline and design every page with readers in mind, and the newspaper is printed well and delivered on time, The Post will be fine.
That sounds bright and upbeat and everything, but as long as newspapers like the Washington Post continue to push their Democrat Party's agenda of turning America into a Euro-style, secular-socialist welfare state, many readers will NOT "feel respected" and they WILL continue to depart, no matter how fancy everything looks.
any guesses as to which ones?
Aw, bummer, you're telling me that I'm going to be looking for a job.
Oh please!!! As if newspapers were the major employers in these cities.
HA!
Yup - sure they are.
Agreed. My uncle, many years back, was editor and publisher of our local paper. He was also influential nationwide, as he was the president of Newspaper Publishers of America -- I think that's what it was called. Anyway, my husband and I tried once to talk to him about the liberal bias in his paper and many others, and he went off. Declared there was no bias, etc, etc. But he sure overreacted, IMO. We gave up on him. I wish he was here to see this.
Carolyn
They are burdened with the resentful upper crust's contempt and dread of their own society, and misapprehend it the way only missionaries or would-be colonial masters can.
Consider Mary Mapes: by all evidence a person totally consumed by delusions of adequacy. Only in the bizarre world of high stakes journalism could a person so immune to facts survive even as long as she did. Ever since the regrettable Supreme Court decision in Sullivan v. New York Times American journalism has become increasingly divorced from the concept of consequences for proffering falsehoods. Why should Mary Mapes think anything would come of embracing an obvious and crude fabrication? Like Professor Harold Hill, she has come to believe that whatever she wants to believe is true, that wishing it to be so will make it so.
There are far more charlatans like Mary Mapes in America's newsrooms than the cynical hardboiled curmudgeons of the 1930's film noir variety. And these self declared cynics are in fact naifs, believing every and any far fetched concoction if it fits their preconceived notions. American journalism needs a new birth. It is not the technology that is destroying American newspapers, it is the practitioners.
I would suspect that who, what ,why, where and how mean nothing to the average Ivy League "educated" agenda driven word parrot......
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