What was once a trump card for U.S. newspapers has become an Achilles heel, namely geography.
Apart from Canada and Australia, Western newspapers are fiercely competitive nationals. American proprietors had the luxury of 3 million square miles and four main times zones in which local newspapers could form an organic monopoly.
Even modest U.S. metro areas offered captive advertising markets that could support papers with mammoth weekend advertising, usually a city listings/features magazine and often free sheets too.
The topography remains but the economic landscape has changed forever; the circumstances will not return regardless of recovery.
Countless American editorials espoused globalization, but it doesn’t suit newspapers, only readers. It seems a great number of Americans have outsourced their news preferences to foreign providers, particularly British. (If news becomes chargeable the BBC stands to gain the most.)
Newspapers enjoy remarkable privileges; generalists and experts conducting post-mortems on everything. Whether it be government policy or company failure the papers are full of reprehension, scoldings and blame, often after the event.
There is apparently no topic on which a newspaper will prescribe corrective action. The only exception is their own plight; on that they are reliably hopeless.
And since journalists have a tendency to be rather self-important, they are having difficulty grasping that theirs is an industry that has peaked.
They are the new coal miners, the new car workers. Like GM, they’re selling minor variations of the same model, using graphics and a bit of local interest to differentiate each daily.
The news being what it is, they all use the same engine. And their fate won’t be any different from that of GM.
Like the bankers, media executives lost sight of the economic reality and squandered their subscription and readership base on an internet land grab.
No one compelled papers to give away their content free. This was an act of folly that would have been castigated in their business sections if it was in any other industry.
They are in a mess entirely of their own making; newspaper managers and proprietors are as culpable as bankers who threw money at people who couldn’t repay it and Detroit executives who greenlit rotten cars.
Involving politicians in the plight of newspapers is another mistake. If anything U.S. media is too close to power; its lamentable conduct in the run-up to the Iraq war could yet be an unflattering obituary.
Rather than reporting the news, U.S. papers have been starring in it. The payment for access hullabaloo at the Washington Post was simply incomprehensible.
The NYT’s running of a piece by Daphne Merkin where she blamed the Madoff victims when her brother Ezra was known to be up to his neck in the fraud was truly astounding. Yes, the victims where greedy and gullible, but this was nothing more than an apologist afterword.
If no editor knew that the Merkins were related or didn’t think the article was questionable then the level of expertise at the NYT is alarmingly low. That
