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Businessweek: How Can The New York Times Be Worth So Little?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by derwood, Jul 25, 2008.

  1. hondo

    hondo Well-Known Member

    I take no delight in anyone getting laid off. I do take great delight in the the institution known as the Gray Lady isn't the oracle of all that's right and true any longer. Not that it ever was. Wonder what the Times penetration is when you exclude Manhattan and inside the D.C. Beltway? Did the Times honestly believe that it could define the agenda of American politics forever?

    And neofacist? Just because I'm not far left, that automatically makes me neofacist?
     
  2. DanOregon

    DanOregon Well-Known Member

    I've read a lot of comments from news execs that say they are still waiting for "the bottom" as revenue declines continue. How can they be certain that there will be a bottom and that the financial outlook will stabilize? I really hope the leaders of the industry are considering the very real possibility that ad revenue isn't away for a vacation during the economic slowdown (recession), its a disappointed wife that wants more than she's getting and she's not going to come back until her slaggard husband gives her the life she expected.
     
  3. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    The Times penetration is 100 percent in the newsrooms of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN and the other allied cable news networks.
    When local stations clip morning articles from the local daily, the major players clip articles from the NY Times, or actually they print off the articles for free from its website.
    That's what people mean by setting the news agenda and that has been the case since network TV got rolling some 60 years ago.
    It is why when a local paper does an article and the NY Times revisits the issue two weeks later then when the movie rights get sold, it isn't the local paper that gets a call, it is the Times.
    That's what people mean by setting the news agenda.
    When Truman Capote got the idea for In Cold Blood, it was from reading the initial coverage in the NY Times.
    That's what people mean by setting the news agenda.
    If the Times goes under, it is a bad day all the way around for everybody.
     
  4. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    And you know of someone else better suited for this job?
     
  5. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    1. The Times is not going under. As long as NYC retains a disproportionate percentage of really rich people, it never will. At the Netroots Nation conference last week, Paul Krugman pointed out that ONE of those Sunday fashion supplements paid for the entire foreign news operation for a year.
    2. Advertising is not coming back to ANY medium, not even the Internet. In a rather chilling article in Ad Age this week I read at my day job, four of the top five marketing spending corporations in the world, including Procter & Gamble, GM, and Anheuser-Busch, are planning on cutting advertising spending in 2009. Prime time television could go under before newspapers do.
     
  6. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    Holy crap!
    http://adage.com/article?article_id=129775
    Scroll down a bit and you'll see that four companies account for some $700 million in TV advertising for sports.

    I think print advertising will see a comeback of sorts, because you can't Tivo through a print ad, but you can on TV. Even for live sporting events, I'll start watching about an hour later, so I can skip through the commercials and half-time show.
     
  7. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    Hondo, you talk about the evil lefty media, and call the NYT its apotheosis. Yet you say it doesn't set the agenda.

    So, is the NYT all powerful or is it not? And has it had more Jayson Blairs, or has it had more Pulitzer Prize winners?
     
  8. clutchcargo

    clutchcargo Active Member

    NYT is an ultra-liberal medium out of touch with most of America, blatantly fawning over Obama and taking the sides of Gitmo prisoners, the poor misunderstood Al Queda, blowhard Al Gore and his $100 million haul touting this ridiculous global warming joke, etc., etc.

    Almost as foolish are you folks out there who defend the NYT to the death, ridiculing Fox News, etc. If you had an ounce of objectivity, even you would admit there is something wrong with the NYT that goes beyond the sagging industry. Instead, you will come back and bash me in a posting or some other arrogant way of trying to demean me.

    Typical liberal---just dance around the truth. NYT is a one-sided paper to the nth degree and everyone knows it.
     
  9. dooley_womack1

    dooley_womack1 Well-Known Member

    And you are clearly the paradigm of objectivity.
     
  10. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    That "one-sided" lefty paper still makes a ton of money.

    The righty NY Post loses $40 million a year.

    Explain, please.

    And I would ask you to explain the Judith Miller fiasco . . . but you have probably never heard of her.
     
  11. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    It amazes me that there are people on this board who at least imply they work for newspapers who do not realize how editorial policy has nothing to do with the rest of the paper. See, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, both outstanding papers.
    If you DO work for newspapers, you are not making enough money to be Republicans. This right-wing babble has deep psychological roots-a/k/a the blind fury of the white male ribbon clerk.
     
  12. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    I don't believe that's ever been the goal. I believe the goal has always been to make shitloads of money. If they believed for one instant that the opinion pages or the news product were responsible for the declining bottom line, those execs would have been sent to Siberia yesterday. They are businessmen. You are taking this shit way too seriously. By any rational measure, just about every newspaper in this country aims at the middle, give or take a few degrees -- and I've worked for newspapers with liberal and conservative editorial pages. I'll put it this way: I doubt you could find many liberals who believe The New York Times is remotely liberal enough. If you think it's liberal, you ought to take a liberal to lunch and get the real scoop.

    I mentioned on the Charleston thread that we were there on vake during the 2004 DNC and I had to buy the Columbia paper because the Charleston paper gave it only about six columns of coverage a day -- terrible display, with not even the inside stuff packaged together on one page. They might as well have thrown it in briefs for all the effort they put into it. Yet when we were there last year, a friend of my wife's dad was telling me it was a "liberal rag" and that he and the boys at the Rotary were considering organizing a boycott over its leftist coverage of Iraq. I really had to struggle not to laugh. To me the paper looks like it's Sean Hannity's inflatable doll.
     
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