The explanation is the urban leftist bubble that only seems to be able to write to itself and thus alienates itself from the majority of potential consumers.
There should be a rule that nobody should be qualified to be a journalist until and unless they leave school and work in the private sector in jobs that make, build, grow, fix or sell real products... and ideally they live in places that don't just echo the same urban leftist ideological scripture.
There’s a whole discussion you can have about the ideological blind spots of the publications of that era, but the core problem was that ad revenue was just never going to make these companies profitable no matter how big the audiences got. (FWIW in the early 2010s, as they were growing, both Vice and BuzzFeed were less political than they were in the later part of the decade.)
That’s why most media companies regardless of political affiliation now try to capture revenue through paywalls.
Wasn't the old newspaper and magazine model that the cost of the publication paid for the cost of the making of the product (the raw materials... paper, ink, printing, distribution, etc.) and the advertising paid for the rest of the overhead including the journalism labor and provided a margin of profit?
Moving to a digital format it would make sense that there is a subscription cost to cover the cost of the electronic platform that replaces the printing production.
There are two economic processes that are destructive to existing markets... consolidation and fragmentation. Fragmentation, the thing that has happened to traditional news media because of the advance of digital media... where advertising methods changed and traditional media lost its hold... although appearing to be a race to the bottom... in general is the stuff of competitive progress where better value derives. But too much fragmentation and the market crashes into a mess. Consolidation can also provide better value from economies of scale. But too much consolidation destroys competition and ends up supporting price-fixing from the lack of competitive pressure.... another mess.
I think media is too fragmented. But that isn't the biggest problem, IMO. The biggest problem is the complete drift away from professional journalistic standards and codes of ethics in pursuit of power, popularity, money and politics. I would argue that it has gone beyond just a problem with ethics, and has become immoral.
When you consider any other professional discipline doing the same... throwing away their professional code of ethical, and even moral, behavior as justified by the excuse that their business needs revenue to survive... well then, that profession has become crap and deserves to be untrusted.
Your industry was destroyed almost single-handily by Murdoch. He ushered in the era of flashy graphics and opinions pretending to be news, and it made money in an industry formerly led by the big 3.
You might be too young to know, but the 3 were money losers for the networks, there only for reputational effect, which gave them amazing latitude to be unbiased.
Fox called ‘opinions’ news and made money on it, and then the rush was on, and that’s when your industry died. There’s no recovery from that.
The explanation is the urban leftist bubble that only seems to be able to write to itself and thus alienates itself from the majority of potential consumers.
There should be a rule that nobody should be qualified to be a journalist until and unless they leave school and work in the private sector in jobs that make, build, grow, fix or sell real products... and ideally they live in places that don't just echo the same urban leftist ideological scripture.
There’s a whole discussion you can have about the ideological blind spots of the publications of that era, but the core problem was that ad revenue was just never going to make these companies profitable no matter how big the audiences got. (FWIW in the early 2010s, as they were growing, both Vice and BuzzFeed were less political than they were in the later part of the decade.)
That’s why most media companies regardless of political affiliation now try to capture revenue through paywalls.
Wasn't the old newspaper and magazine model that the cost of the publication paid for the cost of the making of the product (the raw materials... paper, ink, printing, distribution, etc.) and the advertising paid for the rest of the overhead including the journalism labor and provided a margin of profit?
Moving to a digital format it would make sense that there is a subscription cost to cover the cost of the electronic platform that replaces the printing production.
There are two economic processes that are destructive to existing markets... consolidation and fragmentation. Fragmentation, the thing that has happened to traditional news media because of the advance of digital media... where advertising methods changed and traditional media lost its hold... although appearing to be a race to the bottom... in general is the stuff of competitive progress where better value derives. But too much fragmentation and the market crashes into a mess. Consolidation can also provide better value from economies of scale. But too much consolidation destroys competition and ends up supporting price-fixing from the lack of competitive pressure.... another mess.
I think media is too fragmented. But that isn't the biggest problem, IMO. The biggest problem is the complete drift away from professional journalistic standards and codes of ethics in pursuit of power, popularity, money and politics. I would argue that it has gone beyond just a problem with ethics, and has become immoral.
When you consider any other professional discipline doing the same... throwing away their professional code of ethical, and even moral, behavior as justified by the excuse that their business needs revenue to survive... well then, that profession has become crap and deserves to be untrusted.
Very sad, and look at this freaking comment below--the asshole elite. We know "what this world is coming to", and it's depressing.
I like the title of the post, a reference to the pre-World War I culture that was gone forever and described by Robert Graves..
Your industry was destroyed almost single-handily by Murdoch. He ushered in the era of flashy graphics and opinions pretending to be news, and it made money in an industry formerly led by the big 3.
You might be too young to know, but the 3 were money losers for the networks, there only for reputational effect, which gave them amazing latitude to be unbiased.
Fox called ‘opinions’ news and made money on it, and then the rush was on, and that’s when your industry died. There’s no recovery from that.