I have really appreciated all of the contributions to this thread. As Dan Rather has been pointing out on his Facebook page, few things are likely to be more important over the next few years than a resurgence of journalistic resources, skill and courage.
This is important enough that I think it worth summarizing and restating what the WaPo case *could* mean for the near future. What several have pointed out here so well is the baseline or current context for news: Technological changes have had the newspaper business on the ropes for a while now, and the Great Recession almost delivered a knockout blow, that most papers have still not recovered from. In 2015 US newspapers suffered a 7% decline in circulation, the worst single year decline since 2010 (this and other facts related to this discussion from the very helpful Pew “State of the News Media 2016” summary - most recent data 2015): http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/state-of-the-news-media-2016/ TV news is better off than newspapers, but only relatively. Cable news audiences were up 8%, network news about flat (local news down 5% at night). Ad revenue for cable (10%) and network(6%) tv news was also up. 2015 was not an election year, but they classify it as a “primary year”, and there was some improvement over the previous primary year as well - though this may be the Trump effect. It is against this backdrop that we get the news at the end of 2016 that the WaPo is actually significantly increasing its newsroom staff (again, that was an 8% increase for 2017, compared to a 10% cut industry wide in newsroom jobs in 2014). Yes - perhaps Bezos is overplaying a good election year Trump Bump; perhaps anything more than that is unique to the WaPo’s local industry being of national importance. Perhaps Bezos’ financial autonomy makes his case non-generalizable to more corporate settings, where profit targets have to be met and put into executive compensation and investor returns, not reinvested in the product (these are all good points contributors to this thread have made). But maybe (again, this is by way of a spark of hope, not a QED), just maybe, Bezos’ formula is onto something, which can be applied by other papers, and in TV News. The formula again has, I think, three parts: 1) Investing in (and then delivering) quality, original journalism - especially investigative journalism. 2) Delivering high demand features and general interest (gossip) news in a package attractive to internet consumers, especially young adults, but with limited bleed-over to the hard news. 3) Charging a relatively small fee for annual subscriptions ($36/year) after a liberal free trial period. This is consistent with the long term newspaper model of the daily paper being a cheap and essential commodity, affordable by even low wage earners. Unless you are the Wall Street Journal, which I guess has some legitimate other interests in its model, I think you want a lot of people paying a little for your paper, not a few people paying a lot. When I was in grad school I paid about $26/month in inflation adjusted terms for the LA Times at the newsstand (including the Sunday paper) - that is $312/year. If other news sources used the WaPo model, I could subscribe to the WaPo, NYT, LAT, and my small local paper and still be at half the cost. Again the headline here is not that Bezos is willing to lose money with this approach on a bet that it will pay off later; the headline is that using this formula, he has already turned a profit, and is doubling down for 2017. Yes, there are lots of people who only want confirmation of their own biases, or gratification of their titillation needs, from their news. But my sense, consistent with both the WaPo case, and the stunning popularity of Dan Rather’s FB page itself, is that there is still, and perhaps growing, a real demand out there for actual news, not bias-free, but competent and credible. I don’t pretend that credible news is the pathway to maximum profit for media conglomerates, but I no longer accept the assumption that it is not possible to make a fair profit reporting credible news, if that is the business you are committed to. -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
