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by revelio
1083 days ago
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Not exactly, no. Most newspapers are profitable. The mostly non-newspaper titles you list were all chasing the over-saturated market for liberal commentary and opinion. http://marcedge.com/jombs.pdf "This research follows on a 2014 study of North American newspapers which examined annual financial reports for publicly traded chains and found that none posted an annual loss on an operating basis between 2006 and 2013. An analysis of UK newspaper company financial reports was thus performed to determine whether predictions of extinction similar to those made in North America are likewise unfounded and to compare their performance. Results showed more variation than in the U.S. and Canada. Most UK newspapers are still profitable, but not as profitable as before. The Times, historically a loss maker, has moved to profitability in recent years with the introduction of a paywall for its online content. The same paywall reduced the advertising revenues of News Corp’s Sun and was thus dropped." |
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they're profitable because they have to be. certainly no investor is willing to eat losses to fund their negative growth curves.
they do/did so via cutting off all r&d and investment in the future first, and then by iteratively cutting and laying off from the present expenses next. profits have been extracted by riding the model into the ground.
places that have survived with paywalls do so making a tenth the money with twice the audience. they're only surviving and profitable in the sense that they won the race to the bottom, not because broad swathes of society are getting valuable information about their interests.
the decent into heavily opinion/chatter oriented content was not the cause of the decline, it was an inevitable byproduct of cutting the budget for all the writer headcount. a 20 year process of replacing 40 and 50 somethings who had health insurance and a week to work on something with 20 and 30 year olds who had a daily postcount and viewcount to hit. when you don't have time to leave your chair, all you have to talk about are your thoughts and feelings.