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The Fate of Newspapers: Farm It, Milk It, Or Feed It
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Alan D. Mutter, after a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed, so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it. Warren Buffett is farming it, and recently bucked the widespread pessimism about the future of newspapers by buying 63 titles from Media General. He is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. 'I do not have any secret sauce,' says Buffett. 'There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you'll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.' Advance Publications is milking it by cutting staff and reducing print publication to three days a week at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, thus making the Crescent City the largest American metropolis to be deprived of a daily dose of wood fiber in its news diet. Once dismantled, the local reporting infrastructure in communities like New Orleans will almost certainly never be rebuilt. 'By cutting staff to a bare minimum and printing only on the days it is profitable to do so, publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry.' Rupert Murdoch is feeding it as he spins his newspapers out of News Corp. and into a separate company empowered to innovate the traditional publishing businesses into the future. In various interviews after announcing the planned spinoff, Murdoch promised to launch the new company with no debt and ample cash to aggressively pursue digital publishing opportunities across a variety of platforms. 'If the spinoff materializes in anywhere near the way Murdoch is spinning it, however, it could turn out to be a model for iterating the way forward for newspapers.'"
What is this I don't even....
my local paper i only want on sunday. in attempting to subscribe for sunday only, they say "no, you have to take it friday/saturday/sunday". i say "sunday only, or i don't subscribe". they wouldn't budge. guess what i decided :)
on the occasion i want a sunday paper, i go to the local gas station which is not far from my place and pick up a paper. i won't be shedding any tears when they fold (ha!)
somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him.
I though the US had allowed business method patents, so copying, well thats a no-no. Its that sort of pirate we need to name, shame and stampout.
As of recently, because private newspapers have been shutting down, going digital only, or otherwise withering on the vine, there is another type that is waiting in the wings to take over mainstream news:
Newspapers from governments and causes. The whole government of Qatar is paid for because of Al Jazeera. I'm sure other governments will be happy to step in to provide "news" that is slanted their way.
I'm amazed people like Rush Limbaugh have not stepped in to have their own newspaper printed in a region.
Sometimes, I hope for a "people's paper". Journalism is like the music industry -- completely and utterly dead, but there are some experienced reporters. Combine that with someone who can do basic paper layout, it might be possible for a local paper to be run on a shoestring and still provide reasonably accurate coverage on news topic. No, they may not have the cool Associated Press articles, but it is far better than nothing.
The one thing I have noticed is that Warren Buffet cannot resist getting involved in newspapers. Just because he invested money in them, in this case, I would not consider this a smart investment.
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) both dailies are run by the same company. They print the same stories and have the same pro-corporation slant. One of them uses smaller words and dumbs things down a bit, but they are basically exactly the same. As a cost saving measure and as an ultimate sign of cheapness and laziness, these papers reprint, annually, the exact same stories word for word. The editors are told what their opinions are and quietly promotes whatever rubbish the owner tells them to. There are so many "special information supplements", info-marketing inserts, infomercials, and advertisements disguised as news articles that it just has to be illegal.
Tell me why I should care if these papers die. As far as I'm concerned it can't happen soon enough.
Take it behind the barn and shoot it.
People still read newspapers. E-ink or LCD newspapers. If the newspaper can't find a way to convert from wood to electronic, then it probably deserves to die since it's being inefficient.
That's how the market operates... give the customer what he/she wants or else don't get purchased & go out of business. BTW my two local papers were owned by the same company. They cut costs by merging the two papers since they were basically redundant.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Most notable the San Francisco Examiner. Several of his papers are distributed as free dailies in major cities.
Anshultz media group also owns about a third of US movie theaters (Regal) and show production company that was putting on Michael Jacksons final tour.
He has not publicly stated what his goals are. His earlier investments were oil and gas, railroads, and fiber cable.
publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry
What, never? Locally they're milking it. The physical paper version is a spam delivery service with some stereotypical human interest stories that I'm not interested in and some traditional "journalism" that I'm also uninterested in (horoscopes, local event boosterism/complimentary copy, etc), and some AP news items from a couple days ago to fill unsold ad space. They will not stop delivering spam until mailed paper spam stops, maybe even after. The online version I guess delivers spam (I use a ad blocker, I don't even know) but primarily seems to make its money off pageviews of "comments" which are nothing other than paid political sloganeering where paid political operatives sling tired old slogans at each other as a form of spam.
The cash cow is, give us money, and we'll print your spam and deliver it all over our local geographic quasi-monopoly, I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. Their competitors are US postal mail and direct-mail-spam-services using US postal mail to deliver one pitch per envelope/postcard. Also there are aggregator competitors who mail envelopes stuffed full of coupons and spam and flyers in bulk from multiple companies rather than one promo at a time. Finally there are the special interest papers who will never die, the local free entertainment rag full of which band is playing at which bar and which bar has ladies night on which night, and the occasional political axe to grind slant paper.
Here's the formula. Get ad contracts with Best Buy / Verizon ATT whatever / local car dealers / Target / walmart / local stores if any remain in business. Surround with some fishwrap, containing a cute picture of a puppy or some kid, fill empty space with AP news articles from a couple days ago, print a zillion copies, hand deliver the spam and spam-envelope to approximately one third of local homes.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses"
I'm glad to see they aren't wasting time looking into time travel so they can go backward.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
The problem with news is that the quality is crap. It's biased, the headlines are misleading, and there's often no research done ahead of time. Nothing of value will be lost there. But good journalism, research, unbiased headlines... they're getting screwed too. And that makes me sad, because the news is essential for the proper functioning of a democratic society. If we don't know what's going on, if we don't have people willing to get in there to get the full story, not just the press releases... we're screwed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
if you become comfortable in a certain business model you will die. you have to follow where technology is going and possibly steer it to your advantage. newspapers ignored technology and now that it's hurting them, they trying to catch up. they should have been the leaders in the internet realm as it's purely a communications medium. hell, they should have been driving the internet to new places but instead they are reactionary and slow at that. blogs have shown up far too late and they strait up shot themselves in the foot with paywalls which were put in AFTER so many other site with free content thrived by using advertising systems that didnt suck.
you need to try a lot of different things. diversify your strategy or your one basket may be in trouble.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Two of the big Chicago papers- Chicago Tribune and Daily Herald- each make a point to do investigative reporting, finding information on mismanaged government funds, questionable hiring practices, and other political negligence or misconduct (which we have plenty of). We'll always have some form of news source covering events that are geared towards the media, like the presidential elections, sporting events and press releases, but it takes an established newspaper run by people willing to invest in time-consuming research to generate quality investigative reporting. With politicians who have more clout than an average citizen can handle, it takes a newspaper with a weight of its own to fight back. I realize newspapers are going to have to make significant changes to stay in business, and that many won't make it, but I am worried that in the process we may lose one of our best means of keeping the government in check.
My webcomic
Everyone thinks the news is free since it's all just a click away. There are lots of great aggregators like Google News, Yahoo, Bing, as well as specialty aggregators like Slashdot.
SOME news is free. Flikr and tweets by passers by are free, but a worldwide professional staff of reporters, editors and publishing infrastructure (either print or online) is expensive to maintain and will not survive years of wholesale freeloading.
Longtime newspaper readers have already noticed a substantial drop in the quality of almost every big major newspaper in the country (except for maybe USA Today, which is the exception that proves the rule) over the past ten years or so. They've all had to let go a large part of their staffs.
So just as people are whining that they don't make pop music the way they used to, so we're starting to see that with the reporting of the news. Yes, there will be plenty of news to read, more than you'll have time to read, but the quality has gone down and will go down further.
You're right. We should only ever have posts on /. that exactly mirror what you think is okay. In fact, the entire internet should be taken down so we don't offend someone.
Been milking us with faux news and editorials for many decades, politicking, and whoring for advertisements like cigarettes and (p)harmaceuticals. We are going to have to evolve new systems and methods of news capture, aggregation, evaluation and packaging.
A good newspaper that spends time investigating, digging, and has the balls to take on critical issues have been a huge pillar of our civilization. But take my local newspaper in Nova Scotia. Technically it is independent which is great but it is run by one rich family so do you think that it will run exposes on their friends? I can't remember the last time, if ever, they have nailed a slimy car dealership or real-estate agent to the wall as these are some of their biggest remaining advertisers. They did wail away at our current mayor but it was more schoolyard than Watergate. It was a local arts paper that did the gumshoe work that blew him out of office. The Mayor in waiting looks like a putz and I haven't seen them take a single shot at him.
Move one province over and the major newspapers are owned by the richest family there.
But the internet is made up of a bunch of little twerps with nothing to loose and everything to gain(becoming the next Drudge) by blowing up an old boys club or two by exposing truths that our local newspapers are too incestuously invested in.... I Love It!!!
He should apologize: "I'm sorry Mitt Romney outsourced jobs."
Regardless of how you feel about Warren Buffett, he'll be better for us and better for the newspaper industry than Rupert Murdoch.
A local newspaper owner told me last week that 80% of a newspaper's income is from legal notifications. Cities have legal obligations to publish notifications regarding meetings, sales, and such. State law says they much use a local paper that's existed for more than 3 years and has a subscriber base of a certain number. Of course, these same notifications could easily be included in utility bills or other, much less expensive alternatives. Basically taxpayer money is being used to keep newspapers alive.
Alan D. Mutter writes that with a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it.
Mutter's smart, but he's got it wrong. Mutter's assuming the product is a constant stable commodity but the real story is how its changing. The strategy first has to focus on what you wanna make and distribute (based partially on what ad contracts you can sell). Then, and only then, can you decide what strategy to push product.
For example, my local fishwrap has all but given up on reporting news. Why bother, in this era? Every 2-3 years they fire 50% of the remaining reporters and editors. What they are moving into is bulk daily spam delivery. A big ole wad of catalogs and flyers and coupons every day with special bulk on Sunday delivery.
One of their competitor newspapers has gone from complimentary copy / humor / comics / and some spam to ultra hard core local entertainment news. Every little bar or tavern that has more than 2 stools seems to have an ad or coupon or report in there. Every garage band who has more than 4 fans (the member's moms) has detailed reports on exactly where and when they're playing. Aiming hard for the 22 year old urban drinker. The other "adult" paper has all the refrigerator advertisements and adult diaper advertisements.
Another competitor newspaper here is shipping product hard on the green thing. Basically complimentary copy for scam health products that just barely avoid FDA legal issues (so Tai Chi won't cure your cancer, but it will reshape your bodys malformed chakra flows and realign your pelvis or whatever). So their product is complimentary copy along the lines of you're green; we're green; we're all green; we all read green spam together.
So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to push local entertainment news... doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out "farm it" works best, I have no use for drink specials in a bar 120 miles away, but spam about the bar 2 miles away is vaguely interesting to me, or would be if I was a drinker. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to be a bulk spam delivery service... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you milk it, just like "direct mail marketing" except you have no relationship w/ the post office. So, instead of traditional newspaper, you want to basically be a printed infomercial for one (or a couple) products with a distinct non-common man slant... again no rocket scientist moment to figure out you feed it, so you can afford to give your periodical spam-vertisement away at every health food store in the area, maybe one copy in every recycled hemp shopping bag at every vegan organic health food store...
Oh, you want to publish a traditional newspaper? Oh that strategy is simple, you just go out of business. Kind of like family farming, got a million bucks? Just keep on farming until its all gone. Maybe ask for govt handout?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
He's right -- for community weeklies and even some very small dailies, legal ads are lifeblood.
Much less so for mid-sized-and-larger dailies.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
This offensive post needs to be removed from slashdot
No. I do not agree with what the jackass says, but I will defend to the death his right to prove himself a jackass.
(With apologies to Voltaire)
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Not just legal notifications but also daily police reports, minutes from city hall meetings, and sports scores. If I want to know about local crime I can surf the local police website. If I want to hear news about city hall, they have a website for that. I'll learn more about a sports team if I go directly to the team's website. Why do I need newspapers? I it to hear "editorial opinions" that are paid for by the advertisers?
If you misspelled your misspellings twice in your own posting you might want to rethink your misspellings.
It's Phillip ANSCHUTZ.
I'm sure his stated goals are implied in his, like Buffett's, highly diversified portfolio: To make a profit.
I think the reasons why newspapers are dying is simple: the "de-massification of the media" (as described by Alvin Toffler in "The Third Wave"), thanks to the dramatic improvements in communications technology over the last 60 years.
The rise of cable TV in the 1970's and 1980's, paid online services in the 1980's, the public Internet and small-dish satellite TV in the 1990's, satellite radio in the early 2000's and smaller portable devices to get access to the Internet from circa 2006 on have effectively broken the "massified" means of news delivery such as newspapers and evening news broadcasts by major broadcasters. As such, by the time you get the newspaper in the morning, you may often be reading day-old news! Today, with tablet computers such as the Apple iPad, I can turn it on and within 20 minutes find out the latest news using the news apps for BBC, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, check on Twitter and Facebook feeds, and even check on various news sites around the world. In short, modern technology will make the printed newspaper just about obsolete.
Grow a pair and remove the idiot's post.
Why newspapers even exist is beyond me. Im guessing the only reason they stay in business is due to older generations that grew up reading the paper and that demographic alone probablly provides most of them with just enough funds to scrape by and they make the actual profit on the few younger people who buy them. But once the older folks die off papers will as well.
Newspapers have news I already knew about thanks to the local news channel on tv and the internet. Not to mention the majority of news in the paper is all negative shit I dont care about.
Even ones from recycled paper still contain non recycled paper which costs thousands of tons of trees (not to mention all the papers that dont get recycled and end up at the dump since most places you have to pay get recycle service) a year and even the recycling process creates waste and lost time, energy, money and manpower to process it. Not to mention the millions of gallons of fuel used to transport them all every year. Newspapers are just plain wasteful and there is no good reason for them to exist at all, even the coupon cutters can download and print exactly what coupons they need instead of buying an entire paper and then throwing 96% of it away.
Stop wasting resources people. If youre reading this you obviously have internet access to check the news which you can get instantly for free vs paying to buy something that youll throw away.
Much like the evening news, I stopped supporting the medium years and years ago and I am better off without it. I save my time, I save my energy and Im not bombarding myself with just mostly negative news which makes me a happier person. And in the case of papers I save money and resources by not buying papers. Only thing I used the paper for was coupons, which now I just save and fit 8 or 10 onto a single sheet of paper to print out to take to the store instead.
Whether we read it on paper on on the screen does not matter. What does matter: "How are we going to support journalism?" . Especially local journalism. Who will cover the zoning board. Who will ferret out corruption? The meetings of the Virginia legislature used to be covered by eight reporters, now it is covered by one. ( From memory, I cannot find the story ).
New Orleans may give us a preview, since there is no shortage of corruption. While the cat's away.....
...and if that don't work, Fuck it.
Make them watchdogs again. My local example, the Los Angeles Times, is pretty much just a sock puppet for the state government. Reporters never ask follow up questions, and just nod their bubbleheads at whatever insane drivel politicians spout.
See "Transmetrolitian" by Warren Ellis for a template.
Quote: "I want to see humans talking about human life personally. I want to see people who give a shit about the world. I want... I want to see posessed journalists! YES! I want to see people like me rising upp with hate, laying about them with fiery eyes and steaming genetalia--possessed by ancient volcano gods from the polynesian islands, waving vast breasts and improbable penises at the secret chiefs of the world--naked glowing god-journalists browntrousering the naughty twenty-four hours a day, a new planet earth"
To paraphrase Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, give me ten newsrooms full of these possessed journalists, and our problems here will be over very quickly.
With investigative journalism on the wane, how much worse can it get?
There's an old joke: one half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment.
I think it's obvious that news papers are dead and dying, from an economic perspective, but not from a reader's perspective. Nothing beats unwrapping a fresh newspaper, and nothing beats knowing that there will be a fresh newspaper right there outside your door, every morning. But the reality is that the economics of all that don't really work anymore. I'm sure that within 5 years (10 for sure) newspapers will be a luxury item, not a highly affordable commodity as it exists today. I'm not sure what that will do for the freedom or quality of the press per se - reporters will exist, but will editors?
It takes a lot more than that to get a slashdot comment deleted.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The business model of newspapers died. It's not coming back. It had a long and glorious run, and it's over.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Some people say the place they get their news is from online news aggregators. Well, if you look, most of that news comes from news papers and the newspapers get much of their news from sources such as the AP, Reuters, etc. Kill off the newspapers and online news will also disappear.
Would you just move to Canada already? Nobody here likes you.
but niche newspapers are booming, I know the owner of makemynewspapers.com and their sales are doubling every quarter and they even have a UK subsidiary now
Newspaper magnate: the new Pauper Prince
Citizen Lame
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's like watching the end of the horse and buggy, icebox, or gas lamp industries. Only with more copyright/extortion suits.
My local paper (AL.com) got hit by the same fate as the New Orleans newspaper (NOLA.com): a reduced schedule, and a horrible redesign.
There is now a massive floating banner that covers a full third of my netbook screen. It is intolerable.
Therefore, I wrote Firefox and Chrome add-ons to remove the floating banner. It works on NOLA.com, AL.com, MLive.com, and MassLive.com.
Enjoy:
http://dannagle.com/2012/06/advance-digital-banner-blaster/
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
That just happened in Texas. The newspapers won, this time.
In Illinois, there's a real battle. The newspapers have their own lobbying site. Several bills are pending in Virginia and the newspapers there are frantically lobbying.
NJ was thinking about it, and the local rags weren't too happy: http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2012/01/legal_notice_bill_a_sneak_atta.html
when they stopped caring about me. When was the last time a story like Watergate broke? When was the last time the papers challenged the powers that be? Sorta hard to do that when the powers that be own you lock stock & barrel. Why would I pay 50 cents/day to read the same corporate drek and propaganda I can get for free in their advertisements?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Warren Buffet? The "darling" of the leftist like Obama? A CEO who cuts staff? Oh, but he's a buddy of Obama, so that's ok. Heck, you can tell most paper conglomerates have cut staff. Just look at any of the Gannett organizations sites. The articles appear to have been put together by high school students, no fact checking, spell checking or any other sentence structure. Dead tree papers are a dying breed. The sooner they go the way of the doh-doh bird, the better. When my generation dies off (50's and older), that will pretty much spell the end of em. Some papers like my local, have a PAY website, but it's a joke. You can view 20 articles "free" then they want you to shell out 10 bucks a month to view the site, but, their I.T. department isn't smart enough to run a website & it is easy to bypass and view anything you want, at any time.
keyword: strainedanalogy
...is that you're going from "paper dollars" to "digital dimes". In "the good old days" newspapers used to have a virtual monopoly on "the information sideroad". They could charge extortionate ad rates and get away with it, because they were "the only game in town". Then came the internet. Canadian example; You can...
* search a a very specific home at http://www.realtor.ca/ for free
* search for a very specific jobe at http://english.monster.ca/ for free
* search for used cars and light trucks at http://www.autotrader.ca/ for free
* search for a whole bunch of stuff at craigslist or kijiji or ebay for free
* go directly to Walmart/Futureshop/etc websites for free without waiting for the weekend edition with all the supplements
This drives a stake through the heart of newspaper revenue. Click-through and Google type ads bring in approximately 10% of what their paper equivalants do. That's why newspapers aren't going digital like people expected. Your subscription barely pays for the price of printing and delivering the paper to your doorstep. It's the classified ad revenue that pays for reporters at city hall, not to mention in Washington, Baghdad, Moscow, etc. Slash newspaper revenues by 90%, and the model collapses, even if you go to "digital delivery". Just like "video killed the radio star", so too is the internet killing large city daily newspapers.
Sorry, newspapers as we know them are doomed.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Not so fast! his name may be Atilla, but we all call him Hun.
The reason Murdoch is separating his newspapers from his TV empire is the scandal in UK where his newspapers got caught with their pants down bribing police, hacking into people's voice mails and outright corruption at the highest levels of the Government. He's now being investigated in US because of some of these practices. It has nothing to do with the success of the newspapers. With this scandal, his TV empire has caught some attention over here and he's already been blocked from taking over an other network.
...and eventually slaughter it.
Just like they way they treat sports people in the UK
When I read the "news" there is almost no real news. I get to where I don't even want to wade through my RSS feeds to try to find actual news articles. Over the past few years it's gotten so bad it takes me longer to wade through my RSS feeds than to read the actual worthwhile articles.
Most of the 24/7 news cycle is filler. Speculation (something might happen if a lot of conditions are met), press releases as news stories, election propoganda, blogspam, fluff articles, random famous people who die, celebrities, headlines that end in a question mark (which tells me not to bother reading it), and so on. I don't want to waste my time on this filler.
I'm getting to the point where I would pay for an RSS feed that only had news, that is have someone who would delete all the non-news garbage. I want the economic numbers that matter, substantive election news (why can't candidates just spell out exactly what they would do? I don't care how much you hate your opponent or how awful he is), actual world news (not some expert speculating on what might happen), and so on.
Actually, MORE people care about international news because of the Internet. That's why I read the websites for BBC News, Times of India, and even People's Daily in China on a fairly frequent basis (the People's Daily web site is available in multiple languages). The scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's newspapers were well-covered in the USA, so most Americans knew of that scandal.
Dead business model is dead. Let it die.
The key issue regarding news delivery is the critical importance of well-researched and unbiased reporting to the health of a democracy. Assuming that the traditional newspaper is dying, a new model needs to grow in which the costs of doing this reporting are covered. If you don't have professional, independently-funded reporters you will not get the in-depth, researched, and verified stories that delve into the dark corners of corporations and Government - you'll get schlock reporting that skims the surface, self-agrandizing (read Rush Limbaugh) reporting, highly-slanted (read Fox News) reporting, and aggregators. Good news reporting need to find a way to get paid for, and not by the Murdochs of the world but by the great unwashed masses. Unfortunately, everyone now seems to think that everything should be free (hear the howls when some big newspaper puts up a paywall), an attitude that is pushed hard by certain political types who see this as to their advantage.
Bottom line - how it's delivered isn't really that important. How it's paid for is critically so, as is paying those who really produce the news a living wage.
Actually start delivering real content that is properly edited, checked, etc.
Seriously, newpapers - both on-line and in print - are getting worse and worse about grammatical mistakes - punction, grammar, spelling, etc. They rely too much on technology to find the problems, and don't even do that in many cases.
The 3rd book in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) has a good take on the whole issue. Newspapers need to cut management costs, increase staffing, and actually produce good work. This will in turn bring in more readers and advertisers. Sadly, management is too concerned with their bonus' to make a good long term decision for the health of their company.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Two points: (a) I'm not an American, and neither was Voltaire, but congratulations on proving yourself just as much if not more of a mindless bigot as the GPP; and (b) the emphasis was not on rights but on the idiocy of the GPP (hence the use of the term "jackass", though I'll concede the possibility that's regarded as a compliment in your social circles), precisely because I know that the comment won't be removed and being a whiny little bitch about it is utterly pointless.
HAND.
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they might make some money!
There was a time when I could report for my local newspaper and get paid $50 per article for as many articles as the editor would accept. Then, about ten years ago, the editor told me he only had a $200 a week budget so he couldn't use me any more. About five years ago they stopped paying freelancers altogether. The editor/reporter/photographer could only write two or three stories a week so they filled the paper with junk off the wire. I stopped my subscription. So did everyone else.
Where did you come from and how are you modded up to the top 5 comments in story after story?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Newspapers are killing themselves. It's a slow death, and it's taking a long time, but they're doing it. For many years it was well known that newspapers lost money on the selling price; they made it on the advertising. So along comes the Internet, giving the newspapers the chance to get rid of the costly distribution method and deliver the news, paid for by advertising, at a higher profit than ever before.
But they blew it. They already had the newsgathering staff, and the editorial staff, the ad-selling staff, and the production staff. They were way ahead of the Internet news startups. All they had to do was convert to website delivery, bring in the readers, and sell the advertising. They even had their old wood-pulp delivery model they could use for free advertising to their current customers.
So what did they do? They put up paywalls so the news, and the advertising, was unavailable to anyone, even current subscribers to the wood-pulp product, to see the Internet product.
Lots of business models have given way to computers and the Internet; this is just one of them. Too late now. Time to move on.