A Dying Business

Saying that "traditional journalism" is dying is something of an overstatement, but there seems to be a real shortage of news publishers that are making a strong case for their own survival.

And maybe it's time for us to help at least some of them usher themselves out.

But that's a really scary-sounding proposition. If we help kill off WaPo and NYTimes (eg), will there be others who'll step up to bolster the 4th Estate, or are we pounding nails into our own coffin lids?

I don't know. It feels like it, but I don't know.

What I do know is that the money will go somewhere. It used to go to the big players because they owned the market. But now, everybody who thinks they have good opinions or other content worth sharing - and every jagoff "nuisance streamer" - has a platform. And with relatively little effort or investment, they can all create a profit niche.

Plus, there are no ethical boundaries. No standards. No constraints at all. In fact, with literally millions of content creators chasing a share of billions of consumers, cutting through the clutter is becoming pretty much the only thing that matters. So you have to be extraordinarily accurate and meticulous (ie: what too many of us would consider boring), or you have to be more and more outrageous to keep the herd happy, and placated, and willing to sit through your ads.

So anyway, here's AP giving us a bit of a glance at what's happening to old school newspapering.

• And BTW, by not endorsing Harris, WaPo has left the field wide open for Trump to claim that the non-endorsement of Harris actually means they endorse him but they're afraid to say it out in the open.
• Don't expect to win with assholes like Trump by playing fair. You have to meet people where they are, and where these dickheads are is in gutter. See y'all down there.

Washington Post report: Subscriber loss after non-endorsement reaches a quarter million

(it's up around 300K as of 10-31-2024)

The Washington Post has lost at least 250,000 subscribers since announcing last Friday that it would not endorse a candidate for president — roughly 10 percent of its digital following, the newspaper reported Wednesday.

The Post would not officially confirm that figure, saying it was a private company, but it was reported in a story in the newspaper that cited documents and two unnamed sources who were familiar with the figures. Another non-endorsement last week has caused thousands of Los Angeles Times readers to cancel subscriptions, although not nearly at the Post’s level.

One journalism historian, Jon Marshall at Northwestern University, said he had a hard time recalling a comparable response, although a boycott of the Arkansas Gazette when it supported the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957 cost that newspaper more than $20 million in today’s dollars.

The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, said presidential endorsements create a perception of bias at the newspaper while having little real influence on how readers vote. His said his only regret was making the decision known when passions are heated so close to Election Day; the paper’s editorial staff had reportedly prepared an endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris.

“A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper,” the Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, wrote. “Few will forget about the decision not to publish it.”

The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, told employees in a staff meeting that there were “several positive days” of new subscribers signing up, although he didn’t mention any numbers, the newspaper reported.

Some of the Post’s angry digital readers have also already paid for a year’s access, and will retain that until their subscriptions expire.

“After another month or so, the election will have ended, and there may be people who say that ‘I need the Post more than they need me’ and come back,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

The Post also saw a big increase in subscribers during Donald Trump’s presidency from people attracted to the newspaper’s aggressive coverage, raising the possibility of a repeat if the man that the newspaper wasn’t prepared to endorse is returned to office.

In the meantime, Edmonds said, “it’s very bad.” After losing readers during the Biden administration, the Post had reportedly seen positive signs of growth — until this week.

On Courage

How come the women at WaPo are the only ones with balls?

"Democracy dies in darkness"

Ann Telnaes - WaPo

Opinion

It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president

Isn’t this what a newspaper is supposed to do?

By Alexandra Petri - October 26, 2024

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.

I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

That Mess Last Night

I didn't watch Trump's whine-fest on CNN last night, because I can't watch CNN. I used to love CNN back when it was lovable - when it was the brash new kid, running around kicking over trash cans and showing the world that people will tune in for news if it's a real thing, and if there's more to it than a half-hour filled with 10-second sound bites.

One problem though, is that it showed us how 'the news' could be thoroughly corporatized, profitable, and thus profit-driven, profit-dependent, and profit-mandated.

Lincoln Project: Chris Licht’s and CNN’s Malpractice Cannot Be Repeated

May 10, 2023 – A statement from the Lincoln Project on CNN’s Trump Town Hall:

“CNN gave Donald Trump a campaign kickoff celebration tonight. Chris Licht sold out CNN’s values to chase Tucker Carlson’s viewers in a desperate attempt to find lost ratings.

“Tonight’s disaster must be a lesson that every other news organization on earth must learn: DO NOT NORMALIZE DONALD TRUMP. CNN gave Trump 90 minutes of uninterrupted air time to rewrite history and reset his own narrative. If democracy is to survive, then the media cannot follow CNN down the rabbit hole and treat Donald Trump like a ratings booster.

“Tonight we saw the MAGA Trump Cult in full regalia. Trump spewed his greatest hits of election denying, wallowing in self pity, and told lie after lie, while CNN’s hand-picked audience fawned over every answer and even laughed at his version of the sexual abuse case that he lost. Trump and his MAGA followers live in a deranged world where they are only too happy to take our nation off a cliff.

“To the other candidates in the GOP race, here’s a nickel of free advice: stop being afraid of Trump and tell it like it is. You could end his campaign now if any of you had some courage to say out loud what you are thinking, that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and doesn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Tonight showed that trying to be clever and cute will only lead to your loss.

“This outlandish and shameful display could have been avoided and prevented. Trump is the most anti-democratic force this nation has seen for ages and we cannot afford four more years. He has called for crushing the press and throwing out the constitution. CNN’s malpractice cannot be repeated if our democracy is to survive. The stakes are simply too high.”

Thank Goodness It Wasn't Me

On Trump's plan for the White House press corps:

Watch this video on The Scene.

Survival

I guess my main question is - Why are we always talking about 'survival'?  Maybe it's just that we're used to framing everything in terms of some epic struggle or existential threat. Maybe we need to feel better about ourselves in comparison with The Greatest Generation, so we hype everything into a looming apocalypse. Maybe we're addicted to the drama. 

Or maybe we understand that our little experiment in self-government is actually and always being undermined by people who say they love this country and its honorable institutions while doing everything in their considerable power to countervail practically everything they say they love about them.

Kali Holloway at AlterNet

“We will survive Trump,” I keep hearing people say, often followed by a reference to how “we” survived Bush, or Reagan, or Nixon, or so many other historic calamities.

At worst, I’ve seen this sentiment expressed by people whose safety and well-being are all but guaranteed, mostly to dismiss or silence outpourings of fear, anger and grief from the vulnerable and justifiably petrified. At best, I’ve heard it from folks who stand to lose the most in the coming years — whose erasure, exclusion or expulsion were voted for by people eager to make this country exclusively theirs again — in an effort to turn resignation into reassurance, to transform a history of needless suffering into a warped kind of relief that what we’re facing is just more of the awful same.

--and--

That "we" excludes more than 650,000 Americans — overwhelmingly LGBTQ men and poor people of color — who ultimately didn’t survive Reagan’s indifference to the AIDS crisis, an epidemic the president didn’t dedicate a speech to until the American death toll hit 21,000. As many as 200,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians and thousands of American soldiers didn’t survive Bush and Obama’s wars. The Obama administration's deportation of more than 2.4 million immigrants—a total that nearly rivals the previous two administrations combined—has left countless families broken and barely surviving. The misguided war on drugs launched by President Nixon and exponentially expanded by President Clinton has wasted $1 trillion, led to mass incarceration of black and brown citizens, devastated countless communities and families, and exacerbated police violence and abuse in communities that have long suffered state-sanctioned terror.

Groundswell

David Corn talking about the Wingnuts planning to take over the whole joint.



It's a bit less scary when we learn more about it.

But something that stays a little scary for me is that "the messaging" effort (ie: Corn's point about the apparent collusion between GOP and "The Press") is pretty solid simply because we've grown accustomed to the false assertion of a "librul bias in the media".  How long have 'Conservatives' have been bitchin' about that one?  The frame's been in place for a long time, so we're ready to accept this development as just another example of Both Sides Do It.

So here's the pitch: "the media's been lying to us all along - we all know that.  We're breaking away from 'the establishment' and we're gonna tell the real truth about what the government doesn't want you to know...blah blah blah."

Another weird development is that DumFux News is starting to become identified (by some) as not being Pure Right enough.

The glimmer of hope is that these new revolutionaries can be recognized as being  different from the old ones only in the extreme levels of their hunger for power.  And the exceedingly dangerous deliciousness is that Ginny Thomas and Ted Cruz and Alan West make up the monster of the Republican id.  Created for a political purpose, the monster now turns to destroy its creators.

Here's to keeping the collateral damage to a minimum.

One more random connect-the-dots wondering:  how does Jeff Bezos buying WaPo figure into any of this?

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Wingnut Media Bite

Ben Shapiro (of the epic fail "Friends of Hamas" incident) runs this:

...which leads Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs to ponder: "I think young Ben is honestly intimidated. Cowed, even. His dissent is being chilled. You can tell by the giant 73-pixel all-caps screaming headline."

That's the game these deep-fried-guano-for-brains-whiney-butt pussies play all the time.  Shapiro is so intimidated; Obama has everybody so flummoxed and shivery that...what, exactly?  If they weren't so afraid - so intimidated - they'd do something more than run their horseshit headlines in the eleventy-seven point fonts they're using now?  Like what?  What're they calling on people to do?

And when might we expect the Press Poodles to fucking call 'em on this?

Smackin' My Forehead

Once in a while, I need somebody like Julianna Forlano to remind me - it's not about delivering content to consumers.  It's about delivering consumers to advertisers.