The New York TImes posts a loss and blames it on the economy:

The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York Times, posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter — one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen — falling far short of both analysts’ expectations and its $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier.

[snip]

The company’s main source of revenue, newspaper advertising in print and online, fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory, as the industry suffers the twin blows of an economic downturn and the continuing long-term shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

In a conference call with analysts, Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive, said it was “a challenging quarter, one that showed the effects of a weaker economy,” compounded by “a marketplace that has been reconfigured technologically, economically and geographically.”

Looking ahead, she said, “We see continued challenges for print advertising in a faltering economy.”

But toward the bottom of the article, they admit the truth:

Across the industry, newspaper ad revenue — print and online, combined — fell almost 8 percent last year, the second-worst decline in more than half a century, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The Times Company’s ad revenue dropped 4.7 percent last year, when adjusted for a change in the length of its fiscal year.

Over the last year, classified ads continued a decadelong flight to the Web, and display ads for real estate and cars fell sharply as those industries contracted.

Newspaper revenues aren’t just dropping because the web is taking their business, though. Revenues are dropping because the Times sucks. Yes, they have wide-ranging coverage. But the snooty tone of the paper, the glaring absence of journalistic integrity, and their lack of commitment to fulfilling journalistic ideals (such as reporting on torture and countless other examples) means that they have turned off millions of readers. I can read the BBC, I can read Reuters and Yahoo News. The Times exhausts my patience on a weekly basis.

So fuck you guys:

Trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.

Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year.

America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

[snip]

As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story with perfect balance. As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded. “CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.” Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced—much less “objective”—mainstream news media. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

I’m afraid it’s not the bad economy, guys. People are figuring out to write better than you do, in a way that resonates more with readers and builds more trust. And with wire services gaining more and more prominence in the public eye, we may soon realize that we can cut out the middlemen - from Reuters and AP straight to the blogs, without the pretension, condescension, and betrayal of the American people.

Television can also blow me.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Subscribe via RSS or Email  ::     ::  Leave a comment

Bookmark to: