What went wrong keeps going wrong for newspapers
Alan Mutter, an astute analyst who formerly served as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, now puts the combined value of ten major news companies at only $3.6 billion. Mutter documents the $3.9 billion plunge in the value of newspaper stocks since the first of this month – a period marked by successive new lows in the prices. Astute comments, too, on his blog.
Meantime, Valleywag ponders the five ways newspapers botched the web. On the list: New Century Network, described as “the granddaddy of fuckups,”; Knight Ridder’s Viewtron and Real Cities Network; Abuzz, and Classifieds Ventures.
“The newspaper industry has a devastating history of letting the future of media slip from its grasp,” says the Wag.
Despite the conventional wisdom of "astute analysts" such as Alan Mutter, newspapers are on the downward swing for a very simple reason: they're boring. Pick up any regional rag, such as the Chronicle, and what's on the cover? Political gossip, most of it liberal pandering. Gone are the true crime stories that taught generations of immigrants to read. When I lived in San Francisco's Mission district, the only way to find out about a murder on our block was to watch the Spanish TV stations. The Chronicle refused to cover murders there because it cast minorities in a bad light. Forget the news value, forget that thousands of people wanted to know what was going on.
….Placating their own mamby-pampy notions of self-rightousness trumped the public's right to know. When I worked at the Fresno Bee, McClatchy started a Spanish language version of the paper. The first front-page headline on the first edition was about a youth conference. A stinkin' youth conference. Did they really think that would sell papers? No, newspapers did it to themselves. And, though I love papers, I welcome this new decline. Hopefully, in the wake of such regional giants such as McClatchy, will rise small, local papers that concentrate on the things people want to read about: crime, fires, corruption.