Posted on 12/27/2016 8:01:03 AM PST by usafa92
ENID, Okla. — One Sunday after church, Jeff Mullin and his wife were in line at the Western Sizzlin steakhouse here when a man, fists clenched, threatened to beat the hell out of him.
“My first thought was just to kind of try to keep things calm. Otherwise, it was going to be two old guys rolling around on the floor of the steakhouse, and that would be pretty unseemly,” recalled Mr. Mullin, 64, the mustachioed senior writer for Enid’s daily newspaper, The Enid News & Eagle.
The dispute was not personal. It was, of all things, editorial.
Mr. Mullin’s red newspaper in a red county in what is arguably the reddest of states went blue this campaign season and endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The editorial board, in a gray-shaded column on Page A4 on Oct. 9, wrote that Donald J. Trump lacked “the skills, experience or temperament to hold office.” The headline and subhead read: “For U.S. president: Hillary Clinton is our choice for commander in chief.”
It was the first Democratic endorsement for president in the modern history of the newspaper, which was founded in 1893. As the man’s reaction at the steakhouse suggested, Enid was stunned, and this slow-paced agricultural town of 52,000 near the Kansas state line has not been the same since.
The News & Eagle, with a circulation of 10,000, lost 162 subscribers who canceled the paper. Eleven advertisers pulled their ads, including a funeral home that had a sizable account. Someone stuck a “Crooked Hillary” bumper sticker on the glass doors of the paper’s downtown office. A man left a late-night message on the publisher’s voice mail, expressing his hope that readers would deliver, to put it delicately, a burning sack of steaming excrement to the paper.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The subtext seems to be:
1. Big city liberals forgive and forget.
2. Small town conservatives carry grudges.
3. Despite #2, small town conservatives are powerless and ineffective.
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Another thing not mentioned is that the Enid newspaper may have a “break even point” at 9000 newspapers. The article also discussed some key advertisers withdrawing advertising. This lowers the break even point.
People grow sick of the BS. And my guess isn’t that the endorsement of Hillary wasn’t the only “left leaning” article the newspaper has been spewing over the last several years.
I used to read 1 or 2 newspapers everyday. I haven’t bought one in over 10 years. I haven’t paid to subscribe online to any either. And I certainly don’t support advertisers on their websites.
I keep hearing about this Tom Arnold threatening to release some tapes of Trump.
I can understand that during the primary, everything is fair game, but once you’re presidency, doesn’t the term black mail, come into play?
Arnold is threatening the USA’s security by undermining our new president. What is he saying? Step down or I’ll release this information?
“One Sunday after church, Jeff Mullin and his wife were in line at the Western Sizzlin steakhouse here when a man, fists clenched, threatened to beat the hell out of him.”
That kind of flowery writing about an event that is intended to portray one party being aggrieved by another is typical BS for the old gray whore.
The corporate headquarters in Atlanta, which owns may “local” newspapers, told the editorial board who to endorse.
Why arer you making the assumption that only 162 subscribers canceled? This is the NYT. They lie. About everything, all the time. There is no way to tell what the truth is.
The local newspaper is not going to admit they lost hundreds of subscribers, that things are going into the septic system, daily, since that would prompt their remaining advertisers to panic. Funeral homes are big business in small town flyover country, since everyone checks the obits to see if friends and acquaintances have died. Any actual "news", is local, like the police report, weddings, or what has burned down. The rest is filler. Who bothers with what a "reporter" copied off the AP or Reuters, or NBC when you have the Net, and everyone has the Net?
Well, Ted Cruz didn’t.
Thing is, the circulation number quoted by papers and used to set ad rates as well as determining the paper’s ranking isn’t actually the number of paid subscribers. These days, ‘circulation numbers’ include “sample,” “complimentary,” “school” and other such free/unpaid copies, used to inflate the total number. The real question is what is the *paid* circulation of the paper - i.e., how many people actually pay money for the the paper. That number, these days, is often a tiny fraction of the “total circulation”. 162 subscribers may have been more than 10% of the people still paying for the fishwrap in question.
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