Getting back to the original post concerning layoffs at the Washington Post newspaper it appears that all major city newspapers are in trouble now. Subscriptions are way down from in the past.
And it's not surprising given that most people are getting their news these days right in their hand by simply looking down at their cellphone. Why bother trying to read a big, bulky newspaper when it's much easier to look at your cell phone. Even while driving for some people.
I would also suspect that the newspaper subscriptions that still do exist are held by an older segment of the population. Those are likely to decrease even further with time and eventually major printed newspapers will be thing of the past.
Gerard Baker penned a pointed column in today's WSJ. A few quotes:
"Is there a class of people with more vaulting self-belief or more stunted self-awareness than America’s journalists?
“Democracy dies in darkness,” they tell us, the implication being that it is only the torch held aloft by the nation’s brave media folk that keeps the light of freedom glowing in the gathering dusk of an authoritarian age. It’s true that in the absence of independent, trusted sources of information, power accrues without accountability. But there’s no hint in this declaration of their own indispensability or the role journalists themselves have played in undermining the public trust."
"What’s happened to the Post is, in part, what’s happened to most traditional news organizations in the past 20 years with a glowing
exception or two (thank you, dear subscriber): business models upended by the loss of advertising revenue, the proliferation of alternative sources of news, increasing specialization in audience choice. The idea that the market still has room for dozens of large newspapers offering similar soup-to-nuts products in an age of personalized taste and atomized content is as anachronistic as the thud of a thick daily printed paper on a doorstep at 5 a.m."
"The president’s attacks on the media are indefensible and troubling. But it never seems to occur to his targets that the primary reason he gets away with them is that faith in the honesty of these institutions has already been devastated by their own tendentious work.
The list of recent media distortions—from the
Russia-collusion hoax to
Covid and
Black Lives Matter—is long. But the most important form of bias, more insidious because it is necessarily hard to measure, isn’t what the news reports. It is what it chooses not to report. Investigative reporting is vital for accountability, but for most journalists the people and institutions that need to be held accountable are only those that fit into their selective demonology: corporations and their leaders, the rich, right-wing politicians. Labor unions, bureaucracies, academic institutions? Not so much."