[This chart Mark J. Perry] shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years... Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue.
Journalism professor Jay Rosen of NYU observes that the peak year was the one in which blogging software first appeared.
So bloggers killed the newspaper star?
Oh, the humanity.
If NObama gets a second term, look for the "New York Times Bailout" legislation.
ReplyDeleteI don't think blogging was accepted all that quickly, let alone that the year it appeared there were alternative news feeds from the blogosphere. What I think happened was that big business was stuck on stupid (big money is often stupid money) until they started reviewing actual subscriptions and realized the newspapers had been bilking them as readership dried up in real terms, if the newspapers hid the fact in false data. As businesses saw lean times ahead, they had to take a serious look, then found that the emperor was indeed without clothes. Actually, this may have helped Fox and blog news, through businesses looking for where actual advertisement would be seen, then and in the near future.
ReplyDeletePapers died because of dissatisfied peons (like me) ending our subscriptions and looking for real news, then Fox News, and then much later, say in 2004-2006, the real birth of blognews. Which actually comes down to their (newspaper, msm in general) bias and, outright evil, attempts to 'fundamentally change America'. F'em. I hope they rot in some socialist country, and we save this nation from that.
I'm willing to bet if they didn't throw credibility out the window they would be doing better.
ReplyDeleteOf course, way back in the early day of the blogosphere, Andrew Sullivan was a thoughtful and credible source. Now there are probably millions of us who refuse to click over to his pages whenever they are linked elsewhere. Needless to say, credibility, once damaged, can't be regained. Let's hope that the public at large continues to catch on to the fraud being perpetrated by the lamestream press.
ReplyDeleteThe internet has changed humans in more than just this. The ability of the brain to perceive, process and synthesize numerous bits of information quickly has become addictive.
ReplyDeleteReading blog to blog, accepting and rejecting information, yields a better analysis of what's really going on, if you're willing to do the work, which most of us revolutionaries are.
Thus sitting quietly in front of a television waiting for Tom Brokaw to tell us what to think just doesn't work anymore.
We've become too accustomed to figuring it out for ourselves, since we've learned how much they lie to us.