Printed media is getting cheap and desperate

[redrocketwestie]

Like your mom

Comments

[mely]

I was watching a PBS show a few days ago about the LA Times and their profits (20% profit margin!!!) and how they had to cut costs all over by getting rid of people and getting rid of all sorts of features of the newspaper to maintain that margin because that's what shareholders demand. The need to remove things to maintain the margins is blamed on internet classified equivalents that take away business. Of course there is also the argument of why the hell is the newspaper for the second largest U.S. city only motivated by profit margins when we are talking about distributing information. This is why some people are trying to buy the LA Times so they can manage the paper happily with much smaller profits. In the meantime, the LA Times keeps on trying to get me to have the newspaper delivered on Thursday through Sunday for the same extremely discounted price that I am paying for only Sunday newspaper delivery. I guess I'm missing a lot of advertising on those days.....

[redrocketwestie]

Well, that's an interesting take on it. I'd always attributed the slow death of newspapers to be due to the internet. Not just classifieds, but news sources too. It's simply becoming and outdated medium and the traditionalists are having trouble keeping up. Of course, if they also have ridiculous profit goals, that can't help matters.

[mely]

Well at least according to the program I was watching (I haven't looked into this much outside of my normal internet news browsing), internet news is highly dependent on traditional newspapers for stories. Many online news sites don't seem to have their own reporters at all, they are just kinda collection sites for information. There are some sites, especially for newspapers with original content (like NY times, USA Today and stuff), but if you look at a site like yahoo or google, they just have stories from everyone else. On some pages for yahoo, they will have a list on the right side of the window that says "Find stories from: NPR, Reuters, AP...." In the show they seemed to think the road to salvation for newspapers was to handle more local news instead of trying to focus on worldwide stories, but who knows.

[redrocketwestie]

Right, that's my point. Clearly it's a ploy to get me to subscribe properly, but 57 weeks seems a bit over-the-top for a sample.

[redrocketwestie]

Mayhap. But still, someone's lost money in that case, and I doubt it's Ticketmaster.