Slashdot Mirror

Before I start, I need to point out that any given medium's bias is not inherently bad. If they post it prominently on their figurative barber pole, then readers can accommodate that bias in their news processing. However, if an organization cloaks their bias in a "fair and balanced" mantra, that's simply dishonest, deceitful and damaging to consumers. I pick on FauxNews, but the same criticism applies throughout the ideological spectrum. If you give us a biased view, we need transparency.

I'm not surprised that the circulation of most newspapers is going down.

No one is.

What is happening is that there are too many liberal reporters and editors chasing after too few liberal readers. It isn't that anyone is intentionally "punishing" these papers, rather this is simply supply and demand. The invisible hand strikes again. There is less demand for liberal news and more demand for conservative news.

I doubt you're even in the ballpark. The circulation shift is not rooted, or even closely related to political ideology. The drop in newspaper circulation follows an blatant trend in media consumption. In the late 20th century, a literate middle class would regularly consume complex stories spanning multiple columns, pages and even days. Now the same demographic prefers to nibble at vacuous soundbites or content-free crawls, often fully satisfied with lead paragraphs masquarading as full reports.

In addition, there is little a print newspaper can do to compete with the immediacy of modern news. TV and internet news is now a multi-channel 24-hour flood of new, often dramatic, but consistently incomplete coverage.

Returning to ideology, I would say that the conservative talking point media aptly capitalizes on this new media consumption model. As a niche, the conservative pundits usually program to it, and they usually do so quite well. That's not a compliment.

Case in point,

Case in counterpoint. They don't come more conservative than the WSJ. But, congruent to my point, the WSJ is densely packed with content.

the circulation boom currently being enjoyed by the Washington Times:

The Times appears to have misrepresented the Wash. Post numbers a bit.This third-party resource shows different numbers. Kudos, though, to the Times for their creativity. Gotta love them for the spin that rising to 1/10 the circulation of their rival paper is a "win". Cookin' with gas now, they are.

Another example is Fox news,

--who pioneered the content-free shout-down political hours, with more drama then depth. It does not surprise me that sheeple get dazzled by FauxNews more than the others. Stewart on (the CNN show) Crossfire was frighteningly on point regarding the damage this programming genre does to our democratic republic.

The premiere liberal radio network, Air America, is also doing badly. In Washington DC its listener share is actually so low that it can't even be detected according to the Arbitron rating service:

And by contrast, when Fox entered TV back in the late '80s, they hit the market nose to nose with the big three, right? No? It took a decade for them to build market share? The hell you say! Perhaps this is normal?! Get OUT!

The issue here is not one of technology, but ideology. This country is, day by day, moving further and further away from the left and closer to the right

As evidenced by the administration's raging popularity right now. I'm stuck between, "Prove it with numbers," and, "You wish," as responses. Hell, why choose? Seriously though, show me the data to support this.

A conservative person is not going to choose news presented with a liberal bent to it when the same information is available with a conservative bent.

This reminds me

The other person is wrong, take a look at the ad. hey are trying to educate people what Enterprise is, then get people to fill out a section and post it in.

I don't know the views / readership of the papers, but from how the ad is written it looks like they are targeting "Joe Sixpack", Who probably has something better to do than watch sci-fi at 8pm on a friday night. As such they would be best going for the paper with the highest readership. Perhaps even 2 smaller papers that have the right demographics

Three points

1. USA today is geard tward a lower reading level and has a higher readership. This has already been covered.
2. The Usa today plan called for a 3 1/4 by 5 3/16 inch where the LA times got offered a full page.
3. The ABC link contains demographic info. Here is LA times and USA today

By all means do some homework and visit enterprisefans.com and put your ideas to work. If they want to run more ads the more people doing the legwork the better.

The other person is wrong, take a look at the ad. hey are trying to educate people what Enterprise is, then get people to fill out a section and post it in.

I don't know the views / readership of the papers, but from how the ad is written it looks like they are targeting "Joe Sixpack", Who probably has something better to do than watch sci-fi at 8pm on a friday night. As such they would be best going for the paper with the highest readership. Perhaps even 2 smaller papers that have the right demographics

Three points

1. USA today is geard tward a lower reading level and has a higher readership. This has already been covered.
2. The Usa today plan called for a 3 1/4 by 5 3/16 inch where the LA times got offered a full page.
3. The ABC link contains demographic info. Here is LA times and USA today

By all means do some homework and visit enterprisefans.com and put your ideas to work. If they want to run more ads the more people doing the legwork the better.

2,665,815 USA Today
2,106,774 The Wall Street Journal M-F
1,680,583 New York Times
1,292,274 Los Angeles Times
1,007,487 The Washington Post
963,927 Chicago Tribune
786,952 New York Daily News
750,780 Philadelphia Inquirer
750,593 Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News
737,580 Houston Chronicle

Wow, that's a bunch. So there's like 700,000 registered users (i'm sure a bunch are stale, so call it 600K).

According to Audit bureau of Circulations:

Computer shopper magazine is at 500,000 paid subscriptions.

PC Gamer is 300,000 paid subs

Maximum PC is 315,000

It's a bit apples and oranges, but with 2.5 million pages a day, /. is probably in the same range as these other magazines: and, it's been posting one article about SCO every eight or nine seconds lately...