The Washington Post has historically been about inside-the-Beltway news. This appears to be an effort by Bezos to go for a national newspaper. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have cut staff and pages. USA Today ain't cutting it and neither is The Guardian. There was reference in some of the articles that they think they have a potential to get more digital revenue. That will be key to this effort. But there's room for maybe one newspaper to succeed like this. This can't be considered a path for other newspapers.
On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 9:54 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > > There are several unique characteristics to the WaPo, one of which is Bezos > and his deep pockets. But I want to think that there is still something > generalizable in his apparent demonstration that there is a market for good > journalism. If, as Kevin suggested, this is all just driven by super-heated > election interest, then nothing will come of it. But if the Post really has > found that a combination of investigative reporting and shiney gossip can > convince enough Americans to pay a small price for an annual online > subscription to the paper, then I think that is something that other online > news sources, and cable news, can apply in their distinctive environments. > One cloud on that parade is, as you note, the big bad monster conglomerates > that see news as nothing but another widget in their portfolio, which is one > reason the Los Angeles Times is not being mentioned as the paper once again > challenging the NYT as a national paper. > > But I do think CNN is a little bit different situation than the newspapers > own by conglomerates; as I say, like the WaPo, there is nothing in > principle or even market pragmatics to prevent or disinhibit them from > making money on popular entertainments for large sections of their > programming hours, and also increasing investment in three solid original > news hours a day and the resources to go live during a crisis to most any > reigion in the world. If The Walking Dead were on CNN they could put 10% of > the profit into increased support for news and both journalists and the > corporate bean counters would be pretty happy. > > On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 3:36 PM Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >>> >>> >>> http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/12/the-profitable-washington-post-adding-more-than-five-dozen-journalists-004900 >> >> >> The problem with newspapers is not a simple one of the quality of news. In >> other words, consumers looking for news do not weigh if the news they get >> from a newspaper is more worth their money than news from a different source >> and spend accordingly. The legacy newspaper model is built on advertising, >> which means getting papers in front of the most people, and so a paper had >> to appeal to as big an audience as possible. >> >> Two disruptions: advertising fell off a cliff as classified ads went to >> the internet and traditional advertisers like department stores either went >> out of business or stopped buying full page ads. The second disruption is >> that national and international stories are now available for free online as >> well as movie and TV reviews. In order to survive, a newspaper has to either >> keep local and give news not available elsewhere or scale up to go national >> and compete with the New York Times, The Guardian, the WSJ, etc. >> >> Bezos is scaling the Washington Post up to national/international and he >> has pockets deep enough to take the chance. He also has the advantage of not >> being a news syndicate so he does not have to figure out how to use the >> profits of his high performing papers to prop up the failing ones. That is >> what keeps other papers from scaling up. >> >> Could CNN follow the Bezos model? An independent CNN perhaps, but >> currently CNN is a small part of Time Warner and the channel's business >> goals, dictated from outside, would keep it from making that kind of change. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> >> -- >> >> >> TV or Not TV .... 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