Private equity. They’ve done the math and decided that’s the optimal price to squeeze the most profit out of people like my 77-year-old neighbor who still needs his morning paper fix.
My parents finally cancelled the KC Star when they raised the subscription to $80/month. And they would have happily paid something like $30/month for life.
Never mind any kind of long term viability of the business. Just bleed it dry. Billionaires will never cry about having one less watchdog out there.
my mother recently canceled her weekly because it was going up to something like $30/month for just a sunday paper.
Marginal cost for another subscriber is pretty close to free with advertisers covering the cost of bandwidth I imagine.
One thing trump is sort of right about is the media is the enemy.
It’s amazing how much respect I’ve lost for the media and legal profession in the past decade.
Such cowards…
I’ve seen speculation that the Trump campaign “hacked” themselves. If there’s nothing super embarrassing in the materials, that would support this theory.
I hack myself less often as I get older
The media has actually been getting worse and worse with conglomeration and the near ending of actual reporting and the dominance of just stupid pundits speculating about everything. The foundation of it all was actual investigative reporters and they are just about extinct.
Lawyers always sucked.
Media businesses have always been just that - businesses. They make money by creating and distributing content. But since the advent of the internet and then social media, just about everybody in the world is doing what the professional media used to do, but for free. Competition has increased exponentially for those eyeballs, and media businesses have become increasingly desperate and shameless.
and it goes back to cable news. However it’s happened, the medium of the media matters and the loss of a professional class of investigative reporters that used to be on staff at newspapers all around the country is a loss.
Totally agree. I can’t think of a way to fix it.
Some sort of social or government funding mechanism for investigative journalism / media
But that has the risk of being abused or dismantled by bad faith assholes and would never actually happen because those that make money off of the existing system won’t allow it to happen
They’ll always be beholden to the source of their paychecks. Lord knows the government will never fund a truly independent media apparatus. If people en masse were actually interested in independent, objective journalism that’s where we’d be sending our eyeballs currently. Turns out we mostly prefer to get our current opinions spoon-fed back to us in ways that soothe our self-esteem and fear.
I think the medium of printing and delivering newspapers was so expensive that you could not appeal solely to a small subset of the population. For that you had some pamphlets and weeklies, and some of those, like I.F. Stone’s, were the nuts, but most were terrible. Cable and then internet cut the cost of production per eyeball so much that they only need to find the right bubble.
Has to be WSJ. Dare I check?
You both know that they have this is Australia and the UK? In the ABC (our version) and the BBC.
It’s certainly not without pressure, but it does a very good job of providing accountability to the government and funding high quality journalism across a range of different areas
