Posted on 12/14/2009 5:16:51 PM PST by Kaslin
Media: By now the decline of the newspaper industry has become, well, yesterday's news. Small wonder the industry's own trade publication would eventually close its own doors. But there's a little more to the story.
Last week Editor & Publisher magazine, aged 125, finally ended its run as newspaperdom's principal trade pub when owner Neilsen Business Media announced it no longer fit in with the company's reformulated plans. Journalists who had long since ceased reading the print edition offered nostalgic tributes — online.
That their posts appeared on the Internet itself tells much of the story. In recent years both circulation and advertising revenues have migrated to the newer media as eyeballs preferred screens atop keyboards to inky pages. Only the most innovative newspapers survive.
E&P reflected a bygone era when publishers thumbed through its pages in search of the latest press equipment and itinerant reporters, on the prowl for more attractive and better-paying jobs, flipped to its classifieds.
The magazine, which a few years back shifted from weekly to monthly while developing a daily Web site, never positioned itself as the guardian of High Church Journalism, as the Columbia Journalism Review and other critical journals would.
And yet, it did its part in creating a pantheon of Fourth Estate saints — from John Peter Zenger through Woodward and Bernstein — all the while genuflecting to the First Amendment.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Instant karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead
E&P refelected a bygone era when leftwing assholes could lie to the public with impunity, and never have to worry about being outed.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Good. They failed their readers, not that their readers would have heeded a word of what they said, if it meant they had to abandon their activist reporting.
One caveat. The 0bama admin may give them a bail out too. Although, it won't matter.
5.56mm
Yes, "genuflecting to the First Amendment" for those of a politically liberal mind set.
ping
“...E&P’s recent history provides a useful chapter in this history. In 2002, desperately seeking relevance, the magazine’s owners found an aging rock ‘n’ roll journalist, onetime Crawdaddy editor Greg Mitchell, to take the helm.
Though vowing that E&P coverage was “not to be partisan or not to be left or right,” Mitchell brought a Vietnam-era template to the new century.
Within a year of his arrival Mitchell found that widespread editorial opposition to President Bush’s Iraq War was insufficient. Surely that finding jibed with the war criticism and skepticism to be found on both news and editorial pages at the war’s outset.
Yet that amounted to an inconvenient truth for Mitchell, who made it his mission to goad newspapers into enlisting in his antiwar cause. In 2008 he came out with a book, “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq.”
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So that was the coup de grace. Going whole hog on politicization?
Well, why not? “Double-down” seems to be the motto of the current administration.
They marginalized themselves out of existence. No longer are liberals in control of the national dialogue.
The original intent of E&P was to be a media watchdog, to keep the media from straying in one direction or the other. Rather than be a watchdog of the overall media, the become a megaphone for the left wing and left-winged causes in this country. Their readers rejected that crap and they went out of business.
Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that those on the left are trying to stop the decline of Print media even though such is a terrible waste of trees now that we have digital media?
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