Alexis de Tocqueville on American Newspapers
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Let's remember 2003. It doesn't matter that not a single metropolitan newspaper was against the war in Irak. After all, that's just opinion. What's really bad is that serious newspapers such as the NYT actually sold grotesque articles about links between Sadam Hussein and Al Qaeda, or uranium tubes being sold secretly in Nigeria... Any semi educated person in any other country were laughing about those ridiculous assertions.
Over the last couple of years, the coverage on Ukraine and Syria hasn't been much different. In a way, I think that what's scary is that this was achieved without a dictatorship.
When you're a newspaper hemorrhaging revenue, what do you cut? Not sports. Not style. Not the stuff people read. Not the ability to report rumors faster than the next guy. That's your bread and butter.
Editors. Fact-checking. You can clean up your balance sheet without threatening business continuity by "improving efficiency" and getting all those layers out of the way.
Validating claims about Hussein and Al Qaeda basically amounts to foreign intelligence work. That costs expensive people's expensive time with a very high risk that they won't be able to arrive at any conclusions. Do you expect a manager to authorize a sat-phone when he can't even make payroll?
Newspapers in general do the best they can afford to. They're not the world's advertising platform anymore, so what they can afford to do is of course declining.
This phrase and the thinking behind it are key: "Papers without a global brand have bled money and jobs, and subscribers only provide one quarter of newspapers’ funding."
Newspapers traditionally provided a service, and the popularity of the service attracted patronship via advertising. If the content of the newspaper was drivel, people would move on. Reporting mattered.
Today, media is different, they create brands -- often by capturing uses via portals or other services unrelated to the content. The actual content is a necessary evil. When the brand is global, it doesn't matter that the content is garbage, most of the audience is too lazy to change the channel or update their homepage.
IMO, the only vital media in America are weekly newspapers.
Your title dips below inciting the reader; It's totally drained of any color or interest. It doesn't excite the reader at all. That is also a problem because reading should be fun AND informative.
It's only a title, but I think titles should have fun too.
This French Guy Hated on Blogs Back in 1835
and
People Have Been Hating on Buzzfeed For 180 Years
(I thought I already nixed the linkbait title!)