The Rocky Mountain News closed in February, the first large daily to do so in the Internet age. In a lengthy but candid postmortem, John Temple, editor and publisher in the paper’s last eleven years, wields the scalpel. Quite fairly, for one who shares the blame:
"We didn’t understand the Web…Our online objectives kept changing…The Web was an afterthought all along….There’s still too much of a sense of entitlement in the industry." Audio and transcript here. Temple also has a blog.
Neither television or radio killed newspapers, though both give the news away free. So that bugaboo should be put to rest. But the Web is primarily text, which competes directly, and also can be accessed at any hour, as well as old or new teevee and radio newsclips. Thus. Still, it’s management’s appalling lack of imagination to find ways to compete with Craigslist, et al, that has hurt the most.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
I would suggest their absolute disregard for the truth to push their political objectives is the major cause.
Most newspapers are useless as a source of information anymore, they’re all about pushing their political and social agenda anymore.
You should see the Virginia gov’s race.
The Wash Post puts out thinly sourced and questionable hit piece after hit piece on the Republican and then the Dem uses them in his attack ads.
I’ve seen the Dem use pieces the Post had to correct but the correction was in a small box while the hit piece was on the front page.
And that’s the biggest reason for the decline of newspapers.
Why else are CNN, MSNBC, CBS news and the rest all losing viewers too?
They lie too much and too blatantly.
The only way the Internet destroyed newspapers is because it’s made it easier to find out exactly how much they lie and slant.
Read articles on a scandal with a Dem politician and then one on a GOP pol.
The Dem’s party is usually not mentioned while the Republican’s is in the headline, the first paragraph and liberally scattered throughout the article.
They’re dishonest and partisan and people know.
I knew I could count on you to say all that, and I don’t entirely disagree with you. Except that newspapers have always been partisan in one way or another, and since the Watergate era it has usually been on the side of the liberal Democrats–in part because journalism degrees are preferred for hiring, journalism schools tend to be liberal Democrat and so the reporters and editors generally are liberal Democrats.
But when I got in the game in 1972, it leaned decidedly to the right. I remember how hard it was to convince the older male editors that there could be anything to those Watergate stories in the Washington Post.
The Web does facilitate finding the truth, even amid all the partisan shrieking on both sides, and there’s plenty on both sides. It does expose the dishonesty of the practitioners. But I know they all don’t fit into that category nor even the dishonest ones fit into it all of the time.
If they had absolutely no value at all, they’d all be out of business and they all aren’t. Some, like the local daily here, a liberal paper in a liberal town, are doing quite well financially.
You should go to the link and read some of what Temple had to say about why the Rocky went under. A major reason was its closed union shop. The union rules did not permit much experimentation. Most newspapers have no unions to deal with and many are learning to operate on the Web. They’re only having to cut back on hiring and on salary because, so far, there’s less money in the Web product.
As for the big television stations, Fox is doing very well. It is No. 1 year after year, while the others, as you say, lose viewers. The Web may be the cause. I, myself, stopped watching even before the Web. I don’t even watch Fox, so I’m a poor judge of television news.
Except for partisans like Dan Rather and that creep Charles Gibson. Anybody who wasn’t beside themselves with Bush hatred could see that Rather was lying about W. And Gibson’s sneering at Sarah Palin while he “interviewed” her was likewise transparent. I didn’t watch but I saw some of the clips.
Do take the time to at least read the transcript of Temple’s talk. Not having ever been in the news biz, you will learn some things about it that you don’t know. I call it the “news biz” because it isn’t as highfalutin as it pretends to be.
“There’s still too much of a sense of entitlement in the industry.”
Well, that much is absolutely true. Remember the Tom Friedman’s histrionics?
I knew I could count on you to write that.
And I disagree with much of your conclusions if not what led to them.
First, some background so you don’t think I’ve always hated the media. I learned how to do it the hard way.
I think you’ve only really seen me write since I switched to calling them Minitru, that’s a recent development. I used to call them the NYTimesWashPostCNNABCCBSNBCetc. I didn’t feel like writing MSNBC, Boston Globe, LA Times and a few others too. So when I say Minitru, it’s only recently, I didn’t even call them that when they were lying and obfuscating Obama in to the White House.
And what’s more, The NY Times was my homepage from 1997, when I first got on the intertubes, until probably around 2003 or so, I switched to the Wash Post but that didn’t last long as they decided not to be the Paper of Record (they could have) but instead went full BDS mode and lost me. I finally last visited there when they let some Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists lie on their op-ed page.
They’re only having to cut back on hiring and on salary because, so far, there’s less money in the Web product.
Now maybe I’m wrong, but my whole life I’ve thought that the cost of newspapers barely covered the cost of making and distributing them.
The money was in advertising.
Hmmmmmm, how do people make money on the interetubes?
Foxnews has a bunch of people who are hard-core righties and who slant their reporting to the right. Carl Cameron for instance.
They also have leftists who slant the news to the left, Shep, Global worming is real you morons, Smith for instance.
(I have to throw Geraldo in there as the premier yellow journalist at Foxnews),
But…..
Foxnews shows both sides fairly, CNN shows the leftist slant and treats any dissenting opinions as beneath contempt. Who’s losing viewers and who’s gaining them?
Calling Tea Party protestors “Tea baggers” started with a CNN anchor.
They denigrate, marginalize and outright lie about people who aren’t far leftists. Look at how they treat Joe Freaking Lieberman for heaven’s sake.
Sure you can slant the news, but to outright lie and attack most of America as a business model is outright stupidity.
Nope, most of today’s journalists are really “journalists”, they’re advocacy journalists, pushing a point of view, hiding some stuff and making up other stuff to “prove” their point.
If they just slant the news, that’s one thing, They blatantly lie. They allow St. Jimmeh to say, “I never said that protestors are racist.” when he said just that. It’s even worse as they lie while bleating about their impartiality.
And yes, I use the word “Lie” on purpose, it’s not hyperbole, it’s fact.
My favorite was during the election the Wash Post called John McCain a liar because one of his ads used something that was incorrect.
The incorrect story was a Wash Post story. They called McCain a liar for trusting them.
So when you can’t trust them to tell you the truth, why read them?
If you didn’t read them, Veeshir, how could you cite chapter and verse the way you’re doing?
You commit the same mistake of most media critics on the Web: you lump the reporters in with the commentators. The latter can be as political as they want, whichever side they’re on. The former have to at least pretend to be neutral. Geraldo, for instance, is not a reporter, no matter how much he pretends to be.
“Hmmmmmm, how do people make money on the interetubes?”
Usually by developing some killer app, like Google or a social community one like Twitter. Temple says the latter is what the newspapers are going to have to do. Maybe.
I think they’ll just have to settle for less money than they used to make. Twenty percent profit used to be common. Not anymore.
Web advertising doesn’t generate much income for anybody. Newspaper advertising used to pay all the bills, particularly the classifieds, which have taken a big hit from Craigslist and Monster dot com. But the paper version could have fought back. Instead, a lot of them ignored the challenge until most of their customers had left. Now anything they do will be harder, but they better do something.
But the biz will always have the advantage of the paper you can hold in your hand, clip to save in a scrapbook, fold up and stuff in your pocket. Most people don’t like reading on a screen for very long.
Snoop: Yep. Friedman is a commentator, not a reporter, but on that one, going off on the Web the way he did, he sure reflected the views of the newsrooms I’ve known. A gatekeeper gone livid that the crowd is ignoring the gate and climbing over the walls.
How can I quote chapter and verse? Isn’t that sort of “Gotcha” cheap? Especially considering that you know that much of the righty blogosphere goes after newspapers as their bread and butter?
Like, oh this story about the NY Times scrubbing quotes that’s on Instapundit and Hot Air
http://hotair.com/headlines/?p=54583
If the NY Times didn’t lie so much, they would have a “Killer app”, news.
You might not think that scrubbing quotes in news stories isn’t dishonest, I do.
And Google makes money on advertising, sure they have a killer app, but that’s what attracts people to look at the advertising.
Back toward the end of my reading the Wash Post every day, there was a front page story about those mobile chem labs Powell talked about to the UN.
The headline was something like “Teams unanimous that they weren’t for chemical weapons”.
As you read the very long article “After the jump”, naturally, you found out that there were three teams
One was nearly unanimous that they were for weapons,
One was split but mostly on the “Yes they were for weapons”
The third team was unanimous that they were not for weapons.
2 or 3 days days later they ran another story with the factoid buried within that the team they said was unanimous, wasn’t, it was almost evenly split with the majority saying, “No”.
So it was one team that almost totally sure they were for weapons, one team pretty sure they were for weapons and one team pretty sure they weren’t.
So naturally the Wash Post had a front-page, above the fold, news story about how Bush lied and instead of running a correction, they buried the “correction” that totally destroyed their headline in another, unrelated story (related only that they were both about Iraq).
That’s lying in a news story. Lying in an above the fold, big-headlined news-story.
They also shouldn’t allow opinion writes lie either,but they do.
Do a search for “Dowdifying” a quote. (Maureen Dowd) It’ll be very illuminating.
They lie in news, they lie in commentariat, they lie in headlines that aren’t supported by the story, they lie, lie, lie for their chosen political party and they viciously attack those they don’t agree with.
I don’t like to be called a tea-bagger by some blow-dried, teleprompter reader, I bet neither do the millions of people around the country who went to those tea parties.
Nope, they’ve alienated most of their audience and still refuse to accept that’s why they’re losing eyeballs and revenue.
I have to admit, it’s making me laugh that you, generally a righty even if you are a journalist, seem to be refusing to consider that maybe, just maybe Minitru is pissing off their readers so they’re losing them.
I think we agree on more than we disagree on here. But you’ve mixed television news in with newspapers in the argument and it’s complicated enough just talking about newspapers.
I’m just trying to argue that newspaper bias is not what is killing newspapers. The bias certainly is plainer now, thanks to the blogosphere’s relentless analysis and attacks.
But the dying has more to do with business decisions (or the lack of them) in Web competition, corporate debt, and an aging readership. The last is probably the worst: the young don’t buy newspapers, it seems, and all those aging liberal subscribers are dying off.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024641.php
“I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from The New York Times.”
Heh.