Post by Old Badger on Mar 20, 2020 14:33:19 GMT -5
Back in 2009 jon predicted that the New York Times would be out of business by May, which at the time was not completely implausible. Well, it's more than a decade later, and there's a different story. Recently, the Times hired BuzzFeed's founding editor, Ben Smith, as a columnist. His first column, on March 1, was headlined: "Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism." Smith says his focus will be on "The consolidation of everything from movies to news, as the media industry gets hollowed out by the same rich-get-richer, winner-take-all forces that have reshaped businesses from airlines to pharmaceuticals." He goes on:
So, what's the problem? Smith quotes Jim VandeHei, the founder of Axios: “The New York Times is going to basically be a monopoly. The Times will get bigger and the niche will get nichier, and nothing else will survive.” Janice Min, of the Hollywood Reporter, says "people talk about The New York Times in the way people in Hollywood talk about Netflix. It’s the tail that wags the dog, and it’s also the dog.” I don't really think the NYT is going to become a monopoly. But it's clear that today it is THE national newspaper, with a second-tier of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and then... What I suspect will happen is that some metropolitan dailies will survive because of the local coverage, which the national newspapers cannot provide. But if you want to see just how far the newspaper industry has consolidated, just read Advise and Consent by Allan Drury, set in 1959, and consider all of the newspapers with DC reporters it references; then see how many of those papers still exist, and how many of the latter actually have reporters covering news here in the Nation's Capital. It would be quite the eye-opener.
And the story of consolidation in media is a story about The Times itself. The gulf between The Times and the rest of the industry is vast and keeps growing: The company now has more digital subscribers than The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the 250 local Gannett papers combined, according to the most recent data. And The Times employs 1,700 journalists — a huge number in an industry where total employment nationally has fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 38,000...The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington. The rise of The Times from wounded giant to reigning colossus has been as breathtaking as that of any start-up. As recently as 2014, print advertising was collapsing and the idea that subscribers would pay enough to support the company’s expensive global news gathering seemed like a pipe dream. “We sold off every bit of the company we could sell off to hold our journalism investment as flat as humanly possible,” Mr. Sulzberger, who became publisher in 2018, told me in an interview last week. “All the smart people in media thought it was crazy, all our shareholders thought it was financially irresponsible.” Just a few years later, amid a deepening crisis in American journalism, and a sustained attack from the president of the United States, Times stock has rebounded to nearly triple what it was in 2014 and the newsroom has added 400 employees. The starting salary for most reporters is $104,600. The paper is now quietly shopping for dominance in an adjacent industry: audio. The Times is in exclusive talks to acquire Serial Productions, the breakthrough podcast studio that has attracted more than 300 million downloads.WP column
