Even by the lowered standards of the nation’s media environment, the past few months have been shockingly bad. Between layoffs across the landscape and some outlets outright dissolving, the news industry currently resembles a Civil War battle scene. Just since December we have seen staffs culled at The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Forbes, Time Magazine, and many others. Sports Illustrated is a zombie publication after it laid off almost its entire staff. The Messenger is shuttering after just one year of operations and suffering $50 million in losses.
Understandably, a chill has settled upon the media industry, but in the course of looking for a solution many of the remaining journalists are looking for outside help rather than looking inwardly at employing solutions. At The Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. – in a column curiously taken down by the paper and redacting all mention of the publisher of the LA Times – makes the case for billionaire investors to take over newspapers so they can endure the harsh business climate.
Bacon Jr. stated in his revised column, “In the future, it is likely that lots of news organizations will essentially be charities, asking rich people and also you to help them provide a critical service that the market won’t support.” He goes on to suggest that market-driven outlets subsisting on subscriptions and advertising are no longer viable, but then displays the underlying issue of the news industry in his approach that only Republicans are radicals in need of being addressed in print.
This journalism should fully move away from the false equivalence and minimization of the radicalism of today’s Republicans that still plague the field. Liberals tend to be more concerned about Trumpism, climate change and inequality (the crises I identified) than conservatives and are therefore more likely to support journalism that focuses on those issues. Today, a news outlet being honest about Republicans is both solid journalism and good business, catering to its paying customers.
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It is rather amazing to see this WaPo columnist looking at the potter’s field of journalism today and suggest that the “solution” is to deliver the very type of journalism his paper and others are currently delivering, and failing magnificently as they do so. That he operates as if there are no radical Democrats for the news to cover exposes the very reason his paper is foundering.
Puck News recently unearthed some of the internal traffic numbers at The Washington Post, and those were as revealing as it gets. The paper has lost more than 50-percent of its readership traffic in less than a handful of years, but there are worse figures to be seen. Of those who go to the Post’s website over the course of one month, more than 80-percent of those arriving read only a solitary article. Monthly site visits translate to just 1/500 leading to a subscription.
That is more than a market influence; this is a product problem. The drop in traffic can be an effect of the marketplace shift, but those individual performance metrics show that people are not seeking out the Post but arriving due to a particular story, and there is little to be seen in the way of adhesion.
Paul Farhi (one Washington Post columnist who took a buyout in December in a staff cutting move) in The Atlantic also wrote about a need for outside largese to keep journalism afloat. One of the issues affecting news outlets (including our own sites) was the decision by Facebook to diminish significantly the exposure of news items in its users' feeds. This was, at least partially, driven by a study from a few years back showing that the highest traffic earners had been conservative sources, such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and other conservative news outlets.
Right-leaning pages almost always dominate the list of profiles with the highest engagement on Facebook, the report found. Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller consistently held the top three spots from Jan. 1, 2020, to Election Day. These three conservative news outlets collectively generated 839 million interactions — beating the total engagement from seven of the top mainstream media pages (CNN, ABC News, BBC News, NBC News, NPR, Now This and The New York Times).
Farhi suggests a system where the government enacts a policy forcing social media platforms to share revenues from the advertising chokehold they have placed on their sites, but this is the other factor leading to platforms like Facebook to shunt newsfeeds to lesser-traveled aspects of their sites. This leads to his suggestion that the reliance on philanthropic organizations is needed to pump millions into the industry to keep needed newsgathering going. But this only bolsters the need for outside funding, and it trends to the other disastrous suggestion out there – government participation.
When Joe Biden was selling his initial version of his Build Back Better stimulus plan, one component entertained had been a version of a prior piece of legislation attempted in Congress – The Local Journalism Sustainability Act. This was proposed as something no one outside of journalism wants to see which is, quite literally, journalism subsidies. This pernicious proposal was intended to entirely prop up the press industry with government funding top to bottom.
Outlets would be granted tax breaks of up to $50,000 annually per employee. Further, tax incentives were going to be granted to regional businesses to place commercial advertising with the outlets. And then it went to the length of granting a stipend to citizens to write off subscriptions or other participations with outlets. This means the government would be involved in all manner of operations; from payroll to advertising to the customer base.
If you think the media are slanted to favoring statist operations right now, what do you think the result will be if the government is holding a paycheck of Damocles over the masthead of publications? If this kind of proposal ever comes to fruition then you can completely dismiss an objectionable news industry. The very aspect of our country charged with holding the power brokers in check will unlikely hold them accountable when their survival is dependent on the payouts from those same politicians.
This is the possibility ahead when the press industry refuses to look at itself objectively. Instead of considering their practice and partisanship is driving off the marketplace, all we see is a desire to have some outside force provide the support system for the current state of journalism.
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