Dead trees with print on them (BBC News)

(So the boycott is working, do ya think they'll eventually figure out why we stopped buying their rags?)
Monday, 13 March 2006, 18:09 GMT

Dead trees with print on them

By Guto Harri
BBC North America business correspondent

It's not a romantic image, but it's increasingly appropriate.

The familiar cliche, dead trees with print on them, describes a product that is increasingly unattractive in the United States. Newspaper circulation has been falling here since 1988, but it got significantly worse last year.

According to Deutsche Bank Securities, the top 50 newspapers in America's big cities lost 4.1% of their readers in the 12 months ending last September.

Some were worse than others. Circulation at the Washington Post was down 7%. The LA Times lost 9.3%. A major survey entitled The State of the News Media in 2005 concluded that the "circulation erosion of print newspapers appears likely to continue".

Moving to the web

Phil Bronstein, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, has noticed the change, and he's had to find new ways of hanging on to his readers. His journalists now produce pod-casts, blogs and a continuous news desk, and it's paid off to a large extent.

(more at link below)

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4802814.stm>

instead of faux-news on TV and in most newspapers?

Get a clue, publishers! Print the truth and your readership will go up.

I write for a community newspaper that changed over from a conservative publisher to a liberal one a year ago. Guess what?

Yep, circulation has gone up.

Meanwhile, our conservative competitor across town is whining and attacking us in print for printing both sides of the issues -- while he's losing subscribers.

;-)

Move at will. :blush:

:-)

Not that established media can't make the same mistakes too - yesterday, the BBC TV news said "and now, with details of England's superb win over India on the final day of the cricket test", they promptly showed the video report of the previous day's play - and didn't even apologise for getting it wrong when the report had run!

to ask the fundamental question, "why," or else they refuse to posit that any answer besides the simple, obvious, and, to me, totally inadequate one could possibly have merit.
When one looks past the inadequate answers as to why the physical print media is losing readers, subscribers, and therefore, revenue, one finds that, just as it has been throughout history (pre Wal-Mart,) the key to newspaper profitability must have a strong relationship to product quality.

There are no shades of meaning to product quality. Sophisticated nuance has no place in any news organ that appeals to me. That subtlety belongs in opinion pages, classified advertisements, gossip/entertainment pages, and comic strips. The "news" part, for which the dead trees' sacrifice got its fame, is the quality product that provides the raison d'etre, the essential backbone that gets my attention and rationalizes my purchase.

In an atmosphere where the highly objective PBS news offerings are viewed as left-of-center by FOX addicted, Krugmann deprived mouth breathers, the whole idea of having to make difficult, non spoon fed choices is anathema, no doubt. That core percentage of the reading public, caring only for the pandering to and feeding of their prejudices will never represent a profitable market for non-spun, objective news and current events coverage.

I did not buy the New York Times every day, seven days a week, but the fairly regular stipend I supported them with became a mere trickle, then a dry hole, and lastly an unsubscribe order to the online copy, and, yes, I had been giving serious thought to spending a precious fifty bucks a year to have the fat belly, the sow's ear in the form of opinion pages, online.
The quality product, for which I would pay a premium, is not available, consistently, here.

The amount of work and strategy to map out corrective action to stabilize and reverse the fading fortunes of "dead trees with print on them" will need to be covered in a larger, dedicated forum, but the guiding spark, for which an honest person, of stellar integrity will provide the energy for keeping those dead trees alive is so simple it can be stated on the your signature line at democratic Underground: "I don't want fair! I don't want balanced!I demand TRUTH!:shrug:

money that I get every two weeks to people who are just going to lie to me and talk (write) down to me like I'm stupid?

...and get greeted by the likes of Cal Thomas, Ann Coulter, the local print version of Mike Savage, and a half-dozen amateur mouth-breathers, all expounding on how Gay marriage will make their wives leave them for women and how they don't have anything to hide, so Alberto G. is more'n welcome to check 'em out without a Warrant and Gawd Seddit thet settles It...

Oh, and "Gawd Bless Dubbya an' th' YOO-nighted States of MURKA!"

The print version of an hour spent cruising the AM radio dial.

Good on ya.

or the likes!

America is fed up!!