The Sound of Folding Papers and Silent Microphones

05/27/2008

Paul Munnis


Many newspapers and Media Outlets in North America are going bust.

When you examine the situation then you can see why. They purport to report the news objectively. Then they editorialize and paint the news stories their preferred color thus cleaving their sales districts into two halves -- those who agree with them and those who do not. The most common split is by political party preference.

As long as the editorials are left on the editorial page customers seem happy but when the news story content is embedded into editorials within the news story itself then people become disgusted and are turned off.

People don’t like being snuck-up on and Bushwhacked (pun intended).

From the preceding sentence you can see just what I mean by this charge of editorializing the news articles themselves.

If the media supports Republicans with their slanted coverage then they are insulting Democrats and vice-versa.

With only half of the market left to serve then their sales suffer, their advertising scope suffers, and their income suffers. They create an opening for a competitor. The result is that many are going bust and half of the people involved won’t miss them at all.

The same is happening with radio and cable TV.

It used to be that by insulting the one half then the other half bought the news product to defend their group but the Internet is changing all of that. People have lots of alternatives now and more and more the news is being consumed over the Internet resulting in a loss of market share for the home-town crowd. The bigots are being shunned and thus going broke. Oddly enough the Internet audience is seeking news outlets where they are ideologically comfortable. The opposition has decided the best defense against bigotry is to ignore the bigots. The result is that they are ranting and raving at one another.

Some 40% of America still lacks Internet access and of those with access only a percentage have high speed broadband connectivity. But each year the rate of Internet users is climbing and the rate of media failure is climbing too. It is not a coincidence.

When it comes to market share gains in advertising dollars, Google outstripped every other media company in 2007, whether you look at the Web, TV, print, or radio. Henry Blodget compared the advertising revenues of 17 major media businesses (including News Corp, Time Warner Cable, Viacom, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, the New York Times, and CBS Radio. He left out Disney for some reason, but otherwise it’s a pretty good set of data. According to his calculations, total online ad revenues across these 17 companies grew 9% last year, online revenues grew 28% (versus 3% for offline ad revenues), and Google’s online ad revenues grew 44% (versus 15% for the combined online ad revenues of Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL).

Those news media outlets that want to survive need to assure that they are not driving their customers away. As Democrats gain traction in government the smarter TV Cable News Outlets are trying to tone down their anchormen and soften their commentators.

For example, CNN is trying to remake their political reporting team but people like Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer and others are now typed and will soon have to be given the boot. They have nothing left to offer but sour grapes and slanted reporting and that isn’t selling well. As November elections approach their job prospects are increasingly hurting.

FOX-TV is watching their market share slip as they become typed as a Bush Administration propaganda mouthpiece. So called “reporters,” like Chris Wallace, need to update their resume. MSNBC is also recognizing that they are in trouble and are trying to restrain some their eager beavers while cable market news is trying to figure out what to do with their cheerleaders for Bushonomics now that it is obvious that the GOP neo-con market ideology is bust. It’s the same for Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter, they are loosing audience share – people get sick of shallowness.

Republicans are not the only ones with a lock on loss. The New York Times is trying to cope with the loss of market share to Internet outlets too. The Wall Street Journal has succumbed with Rupert Murdoch buying them out and remaking them into a FOX-TV clone. That factor alone will accelerate their demise.

Newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor are doing fine thank you. They were not taken over by the Religious Right and they don’t editorialize their news reports consequently their material is valued as an objective view of the news.

It has become a matter of choosing your audience segment and then faithfully serving them. If the audience segment is small or dwindling then don’t be surprised if biased service is not valued by many. It will be valued however by an audience of like minded fellow travelers.

Let me give you a feel for the marketplace:

Of a Given Community like Rochester, MN, and within plus or minus 5%:

• Democrats = 15%
  
• Republicans=15%
  
• Independents=70%
  

Thus I rest my case.