THE New York Times once epitomised all that was great about American newspapers; now it symbolises its industry’s deep malaise. The Grey Lady’s circulation is tumbling, down another 3.9% in the latest data from America’s Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Its advertising revenues are down, too (12.5% lower in March than a year earlier), as is the share price of its owner, the New York Times Company, up from its January low but still over 20% below what it was last July. On Tuesday April 29th Standard & Poor’s cut the firm’s debt rating to one notch above junk.
At the company’s annual meeting a week earlier, its embattled publisher, Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, attempted to quash rumours that his family is preparing to jettison the firm it has owned since 1896. Carnage is expected soon as dozens of what were once the safest jobs in journalism are axed, since too few of the staff have accepted a generous offer of voluntary redundancy.
Pick almost any American newspaper company and you can tell a similar story.
Having your circulation in long-term decline is significant. Having your advertising revenue fall as the economy slows is not.
A nice example of how The Economy uses sprinklings of fact to illustrate its writers’ omnipotent preconceptions.
Make that “The Economist.”
I would feel more sorry for them if I thought their reporting was accurate. However when they refer to semi-automatic machine guns and otherwise can’t get basic facts correct then I lose sympathy.
It isn’t the news that people aren’t interested in, it’s the bias with which it is reported. The [i]Left Angeles Times[/i] is another example. I am glad to see the American public canceling subscriptions and looking elsewhere to get their news.
I share your frustrations at liberal bias. But getting your news from Fox TV or CNN.com is at least ten steps worse.
justinmartyr – are you saying CNN does not have a liberal bias?
No, I’m saying that CNN’s and Fox’s news is even more mindless, and probably just as biased as the New York Times’. Scan the front page of CNN.com, and tell me if it isn’t morphing into “People” or E! News.
I try to watch some local news, Fox and BBC during my morning workout. I have a love/hate relationship with the Washington Post. Sometimes they provide real news. Most of the time they can’t help, but slip in personal opinions and call them facts.
The NYT, OTOH … what a biased rag …
I guess that means we all have to be more proactive in finding out what’s really out there in the world.
Brian
The NYT just needs to explain the precipitous decline in circulation the same way TEC explains its shrinkage over the past many years. The NYT should say that it really isn’t important how large its circulation is. The important thing is what is going on inside the paper and how wonderful the remaining readers are. I know this is just the news Wall Street is looking for and merely announcing it should put the NYT stock on a steady rise powered by market enthusiasm.
It’s more than slipping in opinion. It’s the deliberate lying. I called a TV station that was portraying a maching gun (fully automatic) as representative of the assault weapon (semi-automatic only) ban. When I pointed out that the piece was not true and misrepresentated the legislation their response was that they knew it was not true, knew it misrepresented the legislation and did not care because it furthered the slant of the network. As far as I am concerned, if they are not going to accurately report the facts, they can all go belly up.
The failure is not the result of bias, though the bias may be real enough, but the result of a public that is unable to read – esp. is it unable to read anything that takes more than two minutes. So it watches CNN and what have you, which doesn’t require literacy or any kind of active participation. Moreover, watching a video relieves the viewer of another burden, of having to go back and reconsider what he has already read because he wishes to reexamine his own thoughts.
Imagine a society which gets its literature through comic books – and if you read the NYT Book review, you have noticed that comic books get more and more attention – indeed, they are treated as literature, and so they are, for the barely literate. Larry
About 25 years ago I started reading weekly news magazines. (not “Time, etc., but several put out by christians or missionary organizations) Often they only covered a single story but it was in depth with several points of view. Now I can easily find the equivilent on the internet – so here I am….
I do not miss TV. I do not miss newspapers (except for “Calvin & Hobbs”)
Don
Vis a vis liberal bias in CNN and conservative bias in FOX, a good test would be to see which stories, whose factual contents aren’t debated, are reported at FOX but not at CNN and vice versa. Simply saying FOX is ten times worse or the opposite, without arguments backed by concrete data, is less than useful.
Just as an observation, the Economist does admit it’s opinions, but I’ve found that they’re usually 16-24 months ahead of the curve in predicting economic swings. To my anecdotal viewing, I trust the Economist before I trust anyone in any other media reporting on the economy.
Mithrax, I picked up a copy of the Economist (my first) for a two or three hour flight home, and must say that I was incredibly impressed. The stories were in-depth, and, for the most part, better balanced than anything on the Fox/CNN news sites. I found it educating and entertaining.
The Economist can be excellent — on economics. The NY Times’ unreliable reporting and its mixing of editorial opinion into its news pages are what are driving circulation down, along with the Internet, which affects them all. The illusion of the major papers as unbiased is gone, or going. We now have, like the UK, competing news sources with different slants. Maybe it’s more honest that way.
The newspapers have NEVER been unbiased. Take yourself back to the 19th century and see what and how the papers were reporting then, particularly the Civil War. I still repeat, the newspapers – all of them – are dying because America is unable and unwilling to take the time to read. To take one’s knolwedge of this world from TV or the internet is like taking y our knowledge of the world from wikipedia: It’s quick and easy, and accuracy is not mandatory. As Americans increasingly substitute the distant and secondary for the near and primary – imagine cars with drop down tvs and DVDs so no one has to talk to anyone else in the car and never has to look out a window – so they are substituting the quick and easy for the commitment of time and work-to-understand. Why make a cake from screatch when you can buy one in a box? Larry
As a former newspaper reporter, one caught in a downsizing buyout in Decmeber, the turn from newspapers is less about bias (there are papers on both the left and right) and more about people turning to the Web for their news.
It’s a simple case of newspapers becoming the buggy whip industry of the early 1900s.
Newspapers were arrogant and slow to react to the new media and are now paying a terrific price. Advertising revenue, despite what some commenters said here, is directly tied to the size of your circulation. Declining readers also means declining revenue. In the pat, during hard times, merchants often had to turn to advertising to lure what consumers there were to the business.
The biggest loss for newspapers is the loss in classified advertising which was always the bread and butter. With no online free classifieds that frequently perform better than the newspaper, the huge profits from those little ads is hurting more than anything else.
Newspapers base the size of the news “hole” on the amount of advertising. The rough ratio is 70 percent ads and 30 percent space for news. Less advertising, less news.
The saddest part of all this is that, at least at this time, the only real investigative reporting (Watergate, political and business scandals, etc.) have always been the province of the large staffs of newspapers. Television and network news, and this is the dirty little secret, more often than not got their big news off the work of the major newspaper investigative teams. The loss of that will be enormous and even the folks who hate newspapers for their biases will someday rue the loss of that kind of reporting.
I’ve been blogging about this since December at freefromeditors.blogsport.com. Feel free to stop by and check it out.
My local paper is probably indicative of what is really wrong with daily print journalism–the writers can’t write. Papers now substitute spell check for editing. I read stories in newspapers all over the counrty which would have gotten a “F” from my high school journalism teacher. But the real reason the NYT is worthless is because it doesn’t have comics. Well, there’s also that part about making stories up and stuff, but really; no comics?
See sometimes I do need an editor. My keyboard (that’s what I blame for typos) is sticking this morning and too many errors crept into my entry.
But the blog address should be: freefromeditors.blogspot.com.
Sheesh and sorry.
I have not subscribed to a newspaper since the mid 90s. One day, I just got tired of paying to be proselytized by the paper, and so I canceled it. Journalists are self-selected, and so tend to come from a certain frequency band of the ideological spectrum. That ideological perspective is endemic in a newspaper – from the stories it chooses to cover, the placement it gives those stories, the words used to describe the actors and their opinions, and the context in which the story is set. I just got tired of paying to be ‘evangelized’ by journalists with a hostile world view to my own.
I also got really tired of the presumed intellectual superiority of journalists. Listen to them talk (amongst themselves, thank you C-SPAN) about their readers sometime. Or pick up an issue of Columbia Journalism Review. Yet to be frank, journalism really doesn’t have a professional body of knowledge. The Journalism curriculum is more of ‘craft’ then of ‘content.’ And journalists often don’t know much about the subjects they cover. But the content is what makes the story. How often can you read something like Augustine, First Archbishop of Canterbury contended with Pelagius on Free Will, and still take journalists seriously?
Having said all that though, and having admitted my extensive biases against journalism in general, I think Larry Morse makes a sound point. Americans do not seem to want to do the hard work of reading when there are easier, more user-friendly alternatives available. And that is a dangerous trend, because it leads to superficial understandings easily manipulated by demagogues. I suspect that readership in newspapers would still be falling even if they did not contain all the faults I listed above. We are choosing entertainment over knowledge; play over work. How long can the Republic stand with such a mind set?
carl
With all respect to Larry and carl, I spend a lot of time reading — on the internet, instead of in a print newspaper. It’s people who get their news exclusively from TV who worry me. Jim of Lapeer is right, of course, about what drives the newspaper business, but I do think that disrespect for the reporting in some cases is also a factor. I cancelled the local paper in Raleigh because I couldn’t stand the bias any more.
#12 Don,
You can get almost all cartoons on the internet if you need a fix.
I no longer subscribe to newspapers, and I subscribe to very few periodicals. Here’s why. For about six months, I targeted fairly simple but quirky news stories that had high popular interest and traced them through many sources including international sources, blogs etc. (mostly, on the internet). The goal was to see what elements in any given story were reported where. (Obviously, I tried to weigh the sources and cross-check as much as possible. Where possible, I looked for primary source material.) Bias, of course, is very easy to analyze by using the simple techniques described by S.I. Hayakawa’s LANGUAGE IN THOUGHT AND ACTION. Again, given some time and patience, it is pretty easy to evaluate any given story in a fairly detached way. I worked with a friend who was intrigued with the exercise and who has very different politics from my own as a check for my own biases.
The results were shocking even to me. Not only was the reporting poorly done, but often so misleading as to be worse than no information at all. The problem is that trying to get down to a more accurate story is so time-consuming that few people will do the necessary work unless it is a story of great interest to that individual.
I have a huge concern about where good investigative reporting will come from. I cannot see where professional investigative writers will be trained; certainly not in the journalism schools of America. (Sadly, I say this as the daughter of a journalist from Rutgers. I know a lot of journalists and I like them. But they are not trained to investigate or analyze much of anything. They see themselves as primarily writers and that is how they are trained. They are under huge time constraints and money is always an issue. And most are completely unaware of their own assumptions and/or biases. They are not the most introspective of people I know.)
So where will information come from? Certainly, a new business model is developing. But it cannot be just a matter of moving the printed word onto a website and calling it good.
Obviously, we live in interesting times. Especially, if you are a journalist.
I know from personal experience that much of what is printed as “news” in our local papers are simply press releases from special interest groups which have been dressed up a little and given a reporter’s name. Have played the game a number of times as part of my work, either writing the story myself or used a p.r. firm. The papers just need to fill column inches, and don’t have the resources to research the topic or vet its accuracy in any event.
Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments on this subject. The substitution of ideological puffery for discourse and reflection has made it very difficult for one to examine ideas… in the university, the press, or the church (for that matter). Instead, a fragmentation and atomization which leads to hyper-individualism is preferred now. This condition leads (in my opinion) to a greater vulnerability to ideology in many people, as the sources of news they read in the welter of possibilities tend to confirm their opinions rather than investigate/test an issue or idea. In a way, it becomes a kind of self-reinforcing loop.
I tend to get news via the radio (some headlines, usually through NPR) and then various sources via the Internet. But the combination of so much information and the need for balance in my life tends to impose restrictions that reduce my news time to a fairly small part of life.