Old Media Belatedly Discovers That Elections Have Consequences
Back in April of 2009, only a couple of months after Mr. Obama took office, Megan McCardle, then with Atlantic magazine, wrote:
Conde laid off Julian Sanchez yesterday amid more cuts in its digital properties. Conde is in an especially bad place with the web: their core competency is selling beautiful, glossy ad pages that readers enjoy looking at. This does not translate well to a digital format, and it’s hard to make your company over overnight.
A bunch of my journalist friends and I have decided that our new toast is “to 2010″. 2009 has so far been pretty disappointing for almost everyone I know, not to mention the country for which we all have great affection.
One year later, in April of 2010, Newsweek told the nation that America’s Back! Time to Barack and roll all night and party every day!
I thought everything was green grass and high tides forever after that. (Well, other than Obama’s ocean reset.) Recovery Summer, the Obama economy is in full steam, Happy Days Are Here Again! (To borrow from the refrain of another “Progressive” president who carried with him his own perma-Depression.)
You do remember Newsweek, don’t you? The Washington Post began to unload it less than a month after the above cover story ran, and it died as a print magazine less than two months after the 2012 election. And it might have company. Or as John Nolte writes at Big Journalism today, “Obama Economy Hits Media: NYT, Time Announce Major Layoffs”:
It’s not your business model that sucks; it’s you that sucks. — Andrew Breitbart
As many as 700 — almost ten-percent of the overall staff — are on the chopping block at Time Magazine. According to New York Magazine, a whole herd of top-level sacred cows at the New York Times will be given the non-choice of a buyout or a forced layoff within the next few weeks.
And in both cases, it’s due to “rapidly declining advertising revenue.”
Yeah, that’s a shame.
This is what you call going down with the ship. Time and the NYT are Exhibits A and B in the case to expose everything wrong and self-defeating with today’s mainstream media. Rather than do the job honestly (which would undoubtedly improve the customer base), and wake up to the reality that the Internet has removed the monopolistic distribution bottleneck on the flow of information that kept them alive for so long, both publications chose instead to double down when it came to pushing a left-wing agenda.
It was almost as if they knew the end was coming, and this was their last chance.
Indeed — much more after the page break.
So these mooks will lose their jobs, they will move down a notch and take a job from somebody else, andat the end of the day some pretentious yuppie a*****e will say to me “Hi, I’m Brad, I’ll be your server tonight”. Who cares? Get my order right, I’m a generous tipper if the service is good.
I love what Bill Whittle says about this, and he’s also right that there’s nothing wrong with it. The job creators, the makers, the producers, i.e. the rainmakers who make the money that is used to pay ‘advertising revenues’ are fed up with being told they’re the problem and getting sucked dry for more, more & more. Whittle says employers who can and do survive aren’t going to hire – or keep – the ones with Obama bumper stickers – they’ll be the first ones to go, and rightfully so. They made a choice and they need to experience the consequences of it. The pain of an Obama Presidency hasn’t yet been felt far and wide enough, but it soon will be and those who opted for it should be the first to feel it. After all, aren’t liberals all about feelings?
I only ever wonder:
What in the World took them so long?
Didn’t they see that the menu was THEM?
No. They NEVER see, do they?
That must be why they get millions a year….right?
It’s “green grass and high tides forever,” ya schmo. (Yes, my iTunes is open.)
Seriously, good news well expressed. I’m in charge of a public magazine collection, and the Schadenfreude is strong with this one. I’m looking forward to some of the all-but-identical women’s “health” (really, vanity/insecurity, as the song goes) titles to roll over soon. Don’t take this the wrong way – normally it’s very sad when a business closes; it represents not only unemployment and needs no longer served, but also the death of someone’s dream. But when it comes to a lot of these condescending, pernicious spreaders of manure on our culture, I will make an exception. All I need to know about People magazine is that Andrew Breitbart wasn’t important enough for his passing to be noted in it. Come to think of it, the same was true for Newsweek. Insert last laugh here…
Whoops — fixed.
Amen, Brother. Hear, hear!
“they all laughed at Christopher Columbus,
when he said the World was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound,
(on his gramaphone)…”
Nil Desperandum…
The citadels are falling all about us..
GOD Bless the USA!
and He always does (for some reason.
That’s nothing. You know how I feel, sitting here in Israel, about these jerks? They aren’t getting nearly what they deserve.
Unfortunately, our own media has made the transition. Top paper “Idiot” (that’s how it used to be pronounced) created Ynet, an internet site that will ensure that the view of the left-wing nomenklatura will predominate here forever.
On the other hand, their rival Ma’ariv has fallen so far down that they were just sold to the publishers of a religious newspaper (although that’s no small potatoes here). And the second-largest paper is given away for free.
Hoist. Petard.
Sauce. Goose.
(…And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.)
Indeed.
Amen.
No, it’s not the economy, not really. If they had a good product, people would still buy it. They are just not willing to invest in making a good product.
Who wants to buy a product which tells you that you must settle for less, that our best days are behind us. How depressing is that?
Of course, extolling government policies which hurt the economy doesn’t help. A bad economy makes people more keenly aware fo the value of their bucks, and so, they scrutinize the value of your product more keenly.
Then, there is the business rule: When times are good, hoard. When times are bad, spend. They should not be laying off. They just end up offering a skinnier, lower-value product. They should be making a bigger, better product.
These corporate idiots are not entrepreneurs. They know all about marketing and nothing about serving customer. They tell the customers what they should buy, rather than asking customers what they want to buy. They cut, when they should spend, and spend, when they should cut. Thus, do old businesses die, because they are no longer run by entrepreneurs, by people who serve customers.
They don’t think it’s their job to give the audience what it wants – which is useful information presented in an entertaining manner. Instead, they look down with contempt on anybody who doesn’t see things the way they do, and it shows.
We don’t feel like paying good money for other people to insult us.
As I like to say. The old media is the only enterprise where management thinks insulting and alienating half of their potential customers makes a good business plan.
There is an article in the WSJ about GM sending its people to the Disney Institute training sessions to learn how to create loyal customers. One Geoffrey Brackman is quoted saying, “You see these people coming into the Magic Kingdom and you think buying a car should be just as magical as entering a theme park”
No it should not, you fool. Make a decent product and you get loyal customers.
It might be a few more yrs before NY times goes down into oblivion or changes its business model, ie, political outlook. Mexican money seems to be keeping it afloat thanks to Carlos Slim.
Why is the Washington Post still surviving? Oh yeh–maybe because Warren Buffet is its Big Daddy!
I wonder why billionaires are buying into these failing newspaper companies? Are they trying to slip some billions out of the federal government similar to what the auto companies &/or the unions are doing? I don’t trust that Slim-pickings nor Daddy Buffet.
The DC Post survives because it, in DC, is surrounded by like-minded people. It’s the paper FOR Federal workers and their corporate parasites. DC is booming. The malls are filled, the expensive car dealerships are doing great.
All with YOUR money and the money they have borrowed from our children.
Please, my friend, never confuse “borrow” with “extort”.
It’s an egregious grammatical and moral error.
It’s also at the root of all our present troubles, this confusion.
The Mafia “borrows”. The US government “extorts”.
Pray change this in your style book.
The WaPost Company’s main revenue has come from its Kaplan education division for some time now. Kaplan, in turn, feeds off major “investments” in college education (loans, grants, etc.) from the federal govt. No ironies/conflicts to be seen here, move along!
And you don’t see anything wrong with a major newspaper getting most of its income from a non-newspaper-related business that siphons off income from taxpayer money?
Wow, someone’s been drinking alot of the Koolaid old man Buffet drinks?
In the distant past I subscribed to the L.A. Times and Newsweek right up until I decided I was done paying to have my face slapped.
I watch no live T.V.; I don’t listen to the radio or read anything in print but the WSJ. Advertisers have no way of getting my eyes except the web. This explains why Disney follows me like a puppy as I make my way around the internet.
American Thinker has postulated that the old media expected to somehow get their corporate mouths onto the government teat.
Oh I think that’s a definite. Rather than face the dilemma of going out of business or shifting their viewpoint to gain readership, the NYT and its cohorts threw a Hail Mary pass during the 2012 presidential season – and connected! (unfortunately). They pulled out all stops and pretenses of objectivity for Obama’s re-election figuring he’d do a little fiscal ass-saving for them when it’s time to call the bankruptcy lawyers.
I can hear him now. “Our free country owes a great debt of gratitude to the newspapers and other media which have kept the people informed on matters of grave concern throughout our history. It is especially important that we keep the free press alive to keep the flow of information from being hijacked by special interest groups who would stifle the truth and misdirect the American people. To avert such a great tragedy, I am proposing a $XXXM forgiveable loan which will allow these media to continue to print the news as the people have come to expect and compete against unregulated alternative media on the Internet and elsewhere, without having the distraction and burden of needing to make a profit.”
The MSM will grab that bailout like a fat man on a donut with nary a trace of irony. I can’t wait to hear how being paid by the government doesn’t make the media beholden to the government. But they’ll explain it to us. Over and over again, until the uninformed think it’s perfectly reasonable.
You captured the tone and the wording perfectly.
You mean nobody respects presstitutes?
I’m not going to morn for these fools that die by their own hand all the while blaming their (sorry to say – slow) death on everyone else – not recognizing the self-inflicted wounds. All thats left is the involuntary flinching of the body. Rather amusing to watch that!
“All thats left is the involuntary flinching of the body. Rather amusing to watch that!”
Yes, almost as much fun as poking it with a stick after it dies.
Paying for liberal pablum is an unaffordable luxury in a marxist world.
The sooner a Fareed Zacharia is unemployed, the better. Ditto for many other self-styled Leftist America haters. Why should any non-suicidal citizen give them a penny?
I agree with you 100%. Have felt that way for several decades.
How long have you felt this way?
And in that same time frame, how many Hollywood movies have you bought?
Or does that somehow not count?
So the Marxist sycophant market doesn’t support consumption, advertising, or print, wot a shame.
Seems to leave a lot of space for a news magazine or daily paper reboot, however.
With, like, real journalism?
A friend of mine who was a newspaper man for many years told me that newspapers are in the advertising business, not the news business. No eyeballs, no ads, no newspapers. Sounds about right to me.
That’s even truer for the broadcast industry (though not cable channels, which also collect subscriber fees). Newspapers get some money from subscriptions and newsstand sales. Local TV and radio are 100% dependent on ads.
no worries, thanks to our islamofascist, they’ll get 48 months of unemployment, food stamps, free phones, etc. won’t need a job until its time to multi-vote for mein fuhrer again, like it matters.
maybe they could get some free $$ from uncle sugar and go back to a real journalism school, if any still exist.
I remember when either Time or Newsweek would provide all the information a person needed–from foreign news, economics, politics, science, fashion, etc. That was 50 years ago when there were real reporters who recognized that reality is objective. But even then the downhill slide was beginning. I remember Dan Rather lying about the JFK murder, saying that a Gallup poll revealed that the people of Texas were bigoted, violent, etc.–i.e. the liberal view of Southerners. The OPPOSITE was revealed by the Gallup poll.
For those old enough, they will know that the print media ‘news’ magazines have never been etched in stone. Maybe one day the community news media will return to some strength and leave the socalled giants of print media to the curb. To bad we can’t kick the ‘cable news’ idiots to the curb also But then they and the internet blogsphere serve the minority extremists of which the overwhelming majority of americans ignore anyway — approximately 3-6 million of the 30-32 million TV viewers per night. Could be off on the exact numbers but they’re proportionally correct, just the same.
Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice the hat. I hardly ever think about hats except sometimes. Perhaps hats will save journalism, assuming they aren’t silly hats. Obama? Yes, if he could he’d wear a baseball cap sideways. For the rest of us, real hats.
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/12/hat-makes-man.html
Megan McCardle is an example of a certain type of pseudo-sophisticate and faux-intellectual who famously voted for Obama and then spent four years complaining about him. My guess is she voted for him again.
They all did.
She is of that type, that generation, who never “got” America.
She is of that type. that conceited clique of pampered posers, who were taught to hate this country more than to appreciate it, and who learned their lessons very well. They were told they were above it all, when in truth they were and still are beneath it all in the manner of sewer systems being beneath it all. They to a person are brainwashed, but fancy themselves free tinkers.
In Obama (and Reid, and Pelosi), they will get what they deserve. The problem is that the rest of us decent Americans who love our country and appreciate its greatness will get what they deserve too.
Good grief, Mike M., please say nothing low about sewers!
By some weird coincidence I have written recently about sewers, not so much about hats, and I am discouraged that where I reside in the Amazon jungle our own nation, i.e. the U.S.A. is not the nation building a new and major and important sewer system here. america today is not the America I grew up in, and it shows in journalism and sewers and military interventions and nearly anything else we care to mention.
It seems the most important thing most U.S. journalists can find to write about is “racism.” But no, the most important thing one can write about, aside from hats, is sewers. When is the last time your local paper wrote a five part series on the sewer system in your town? Believe me, sewers are as important and interesting as hats, if not moreso. Journalism is dying in the West because we suffer from low-rent Philosopher Kings who don’t get America because they don’t get hats and sewers and working for a living and living private lives of home and family and community. Journalists want to “think big.” But what, I ask you, is bigger than the sewer system?
OK. maybe quite a few things; but the point is that journalism can be significant when people stop trying to be significant and when they instead think a bit and write about simple things that matter more than being important. Hats, Sewers. The color yellow. Sewing machines. Typewriters. Telephones.
I live in a city in the Amazon jungle and I have something to report daily, as a rule, and most of it is not “significant.” Yet, like hats and sewers it is important in a small way, in small ways that “racism” is not.
Racism? How many of our intellectuals know of, let alone have read and written about, Artur de Gobineau? Ecology? Who among them knows of Ernst Haekel? A woman’s right to choose? When have you met a journalist who has suffered through the written idiocy of M. Sanger? It’s about sewers and hats and stuff. That is the kind of thing that is for people who “get” America. Oh… intellectuals. I wrote a whole book about them. but it’s toilets and belts and telephones and bakeries that matter. Racism? It’s a non-issue for most. Sewers? There is little hope for a nation that turns its nose up at the common man and his life.
Excellent post, Dag!
Woodsman, I suspect you are all too familiar with the telephone book-size, (I come from a small town,) government-issued guideline for trout fishing back home. In the Amazon and the Andes and the Chaco I find freedom. I go fishing any time I like and for what and where. I do this while wearing crocodile-skin boots of the beast I ate. You and I call this the food chain. Back home, too many journalists would call it “murder”(meat is) and would call the police. I could go to jail for eating. And for fishing. And for wearing my boots.
I love my country, no question, but I have to love it from afar because I love my freedom, too. I’m sorry to say, many people back home are now too young to know what our freedom was. I find it in the frontiers of South America. It’s not supposed to be this way. But such is life, and mine is pretty good out here in the woods, as it were.
Thanks for the comment.
Your situation sounds appealing. If things continue on the same tack here in the land of the formerly free and home of the formerly brave I just may come down there and look you up. I promise to bring only my woodsman’s sensibilities and a few good flyrods.
Dag!
Nice to see your writings again! Your blog about sewers in Peru was good. Having lived overseas for a couple of years, I can definitely understand.
It seems that most paper-based journalism is more of a mouth-piece for an ideology in the USA and overseas.
I take your point about being insulting to sewers. The fact of them reveals an alive civilization.
The fact of the Megan McArdles of the world reveals a dead or dying one.
Her ilk are of a certain repulsive type who really do see themselves as above it all. What I meant is that they in actuality (unknown to their own selves) beneath it all in the undermining sense. They are lower than the sewer – a wholesome and vibrant thing – and undermine the sewer as they undermine everything.
The likes of McArdle have no true appreciation of anything good. Check the history books. That lot is the true rot of every civilization that ever died.
What is truly heart-breaking is that we made her. The West has to go back and correct its mistakes. How did it happen, we must ask if we are to have any hope of survival, that our best education produced that monstrosity? (again, using her as representative of a whole cadre of enlightened destroyers or at best leaching ingrates.)
Time and The New York Times are going in the toilet because of hateful biased journalism? Wow, I’m “crushed.” Let’s take up a collection and send them each a bunch of dead roses. It will be very symbolic of where they are headed: the ash heap of history.
I don’t really mind that Time and the New York Times are so biased. What I DO mind is that they are so very biased and still claim not to be. The sheer lying and hypocrisy is what makes them so hateful. That and the fact that they are supposed to represent the people by holding politicians accountable for their actions. But when they’re in bed with one political party and support it no matter how corrupt it is, then they are not only letting journalism down, but the American people as well. Horrible to have to waste Freedom of the Press on lowlifes like this.
I can’t wait to see them all go down, all those that worked tirelessly to undermine this country and the Constitution. I sincerely hope that they thank their dear leader, the One, for allowing them to be his victims.
In the meantime, do not read their crap or visit their websites. I did my part tonight by not watching the Golden Globes or whatever the heck it was on NBC.
Newly unemployed lawmakers buzzing about million-dollar lobbying jobs By Kevin Bogardus – 01/13/13
http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/276763-newly-unemployed-lawmakers-buzzing-about-million-dollar-lobby-jobs
It’s a slow Sunday night in the Amazon here at Iquitos, Peru, and I miss my fellow Americans at the local cafe, closed tonight; so I beg your indulgence while I write in English, a rare treat for me some days, such as this when everything conversational is in– French!
Libertyship46 writes that “Time and The New York Times are going in the toilet….” I won’t complain that toilet (c. 1530) is a French word. The beauty of English is that we don’t complain about loan words and set up a committee of intellectuals to keep out foreign words. The beauty of America is that we … used to… welcome foreign ideas, and we made them our own. I’m thinking of, for example, democracy. Today I’d be afraid to open my mouth in public to swallow a Big Gulp for fear of being arrested. I could hide in the bathroom, but there I might have to share it with a woman and a transsexual, not so much to my taste. Foreign, yes; alien, no. I’m open to many things, some disgusting and repulsive to most people, like pate de fois gras, illegal at home, by the way. But I’m not so keen on foreign things like tyranny. Thus, I find myself more at home in, surprising to many, Bolivia. Like the English language we used to use mostly, I am keen on borrowing and adapting and making things better by making them my own for myself. My neighbour will probably never forgive me for that, but he’s not going all the way to Peru to retrieve a lawnmower. The New York Times and Time Magazine are going down the tubes because they would come to Peru to track down a lost lawnmower if they could tie to to American imperialism in the Amazon. No one really cares, other than my neighbour. But even he probably doesn’t care so much now that he’s laid up with a bad back from using the scythe to cut the hay in the yard. America, as is so plain to most, is not a foreign nation to its own people: it is not 19th century Prussia. This is lost on those who create the NYT and Time and have no idea what they do or why. Our intelligentsia, a Russian term, is enamoured of Fredrick and Bismarck, mired in State Socialism on the Prussian model, the German Revolution. Why is american journalism in the toilet? We aren’t 19th century Prussians. Who doesn’t know this? Even our intelligentsia, who don’t seem to have any idea of the history of their ideas. thus, knowing nothing much about toilets, the intelligentsia indulge in cliches about other things they know not of and that bore us and infuriate us and make us rebel against the system to the point some of us go so far as the high Andes of Bolivia to find our freedom again. Or, as is the case for this fan of all things beautiful and useful, like toilets, the Amazon of Peru. Bolivia, hate to say, is freer than America. What most Americans know at least intuitively is that we are being enslaved by a foreign ‘ideology,’ if I must continue with French this evening. We don’t like it. We don’t pay money for it. The media is dying because we don’t like it. And the Prussians of the New Class are determined to pursue their doom as surely as the Junkers did theirs. Fichte could well have summed up his entire philosophy by slightly altering his praze, writing that: “It depends on the kind of hat one wears.”
Journalists today, mostly, are foreigners in America, and they are indeed going down the toilet in a less than French way. (Huh? I don’t know. That just seemed so right.) I am off to join the party. French?
Toilet. Ideology.
Bonne nuit, y’all.
In my humble opinion, the contemptible big media may have cut back on personnel and sell less advertising these days, yes. However, rumors of their* demise seem awfully premature when you look at the enormous influence they wield still. [*Please excuse my forgetting my Latin lessons, but I do not know whether "media" takes plural or singular verb and pronoun.]
Witness the most recent election.
Through the power of the media POTUS ‘s dismal economy and junior-high school level leadership skills were morphed into something wonderful and desirable.
At the same time Romney was shrunken man, small and mean, with greed in his heart. A portrayal that was just as wrong as that of POTUS.
But.
But, that dang decadent big media held sway. They had a mighty influence on the election.
And would anyone say that they are not continuing to use their influence to whitewash the childish leadership and negotiating powers of POTUS in his dealings with Boehner? In his juvenile pronouncements on gun control.
It does feel so good to believe that big media is over. I think, however, we must believe otherwise. Until their influence wanes, I shall fear their influence.
Jaynie – Of all the posts on this page, I am afraid yours is (sadly) the most truthful. Note how the mass public still blames ‘Bush and the Republican policies’ for the fiscal crisis. How many people understand the complicity of the Democrat’s Community Reinvestment Act, of the Democrat institutions Fannie May (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FDMC), and that now Governor Cuomo (D – NY), as head of HUD, created policies that had more complicity than almost anyone else in the country. If the low-information public knew the truth, there would be few Democrats running the country. Instead, the Republicans were “blamed” and somehow have been on the defensive.
DAG…nice prose, I enjoyed it… not as much as I enjoy the fact that the government propaganda mechanisms are failing. I quit reading them years ago when I was stuck in a far away land courtesy of the U.S.M.C. and found myself being roundly criticized for participating in events that were not of my choosing. By the way, if you happen upon an Amazon River captain by the name of Gary Lighthall (another American transplant), please tip your hat and tell him an old friend from Mtn. View said hello.
Speaking of deterioration:
You are aware that ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ have proper uses in English and are not interchangeable, right?
Americans need to consume less? But I thought the Krugman/Keynesian Economic theory, pooh-poohing Supply-side economics, was Demand driven. The whole point of temporary tax cuts and stimulus was to drive demand higher to expand the economy, but they actually want demand to go down?
Hmmm, anyone else smell a hidden agenda?
Hello, Sixgun. If I come second in a contest between my prose and the fall of leftist journalism in America I think you’ve elevated me as high as I could hope to get in this life. Thank you very much. We can skip all the other things I come second to. I’m sticking to my sixguns here.
About the war? Which one would that be where you were roundly criticised? Viet Nam? Yes, The The Gulf Wars? Sure. Granada? That’s entirely possible. World War One or Two? You didn’t stand a chance with those people no matter what you did. We don’t get to choose the wars we fight. That’s because we don’t choose war. War chooses us, and we decide which ones to fight.
I’ve lived a fair long time now, and over the times I’ve come to regret possibly as much as any great failure on my part the fact that I didn’t go to Viet Nam. I don’t much care if it was right or wrong there, I regret that I wasn’t there with my buddies, and am now and forever excluded from that great fraternity of men who were.
I’ll ask about your friend. Meanwhiles, I tip my hat to you.
Dag – thank you for the kind words. My overseas adventures were mostly small incursions kept quiet from the American public. I did participate in one very public exercise in Lebanon in 1983. Radical muslims took out our barracks and Reagan pulled us out, I lost three friends in that terrorist attack. With the way our beloved America is heading today, sometimes I feel that I may have wasted my time serving this country. Some of the things I was reading at the time in the lame-stream media about that whole affair was depressing.
Regarding my long lost friend in the Amazon jungle… if you have time and are interested visit his website at http://www.greentracks.com/Amazon-Frontier-Expedition.html, he does eco-boat trips for tourists up and down the river in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. If things in this country continue at the present pace, I may soon join my fellow expatriate Americans. God bless you.
“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes…”
And elect another? Which brings to mind a few lines form Brecht’s Einlosung (The Solution):
“…Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
Ten percent? That’s terrible; it means ninety percent of that despicable lot remain. Well, given the strength of the recovery, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more.
By now everyone probably knows at least one liberal who was stunned when his or her paycheck shrunk due to the higher payroll taxes. “Congratulations,” I said. “You’re rich.”