I just can’t believe the Sun-Times, once a huge powerhouse, is being bought by a local NPR radio affiliate. This is as if the Coca-Cola Company fell so low that they were snapped up by some little outfit that makes oddball sodas like fennel twig. The newspaper industry is not doing so good, is it?
No, it’s not, and the Sun-Times is among the many papers which have been struggling to survive for a number of years. It’s gone through numerous rounds of staff cuts and resignations, it’s now printed and distributed by the Tribune, and it has changed hands several times.
Yes, Cecil had many excellent turns of phrase. “If ignorance were cornflakes, you’d be General Mills”; “Observe the snow, it fornicates”; “What makes you think you have to worry about how crowded it will be in Heaven?”; “Some do it because they’re just lying sacks of shit”; etc.
NPR should have had it so good.
“I swear, everyone in Baltimore is bent” … yes we were.
My fear is that some middle manager, with a case of manageritis, will shake things up for the sake of shaking things up and pull the plug on the SDMB.
Maybe I’m jaded, since I’ve been part of companies being by gobbled up and dealt with so much managerial BS.
Or if NBC and GE were bought by the Sheinhardt Wig Company.
WBEZ claims 86,000 members.. The Sun-Times has an audited circulation of 61,825.
Almost every large, daily U.S. newspaper saw its circulation drop during Covid.
Commuters are one of the last major reservoirs of newspaper buyers, so that makes sense.
Formal transfer of ownership is expected to take place on January 31, 2022:
That’s a whole lot of talk without really saying anything about the most important thing, the SDMB. What it all means to the SDMB should be right out front. Priorities, people, priorities!
Just for fun, how many discrete views does the board get in a day? Including people that follow one time links and people that read but don’t have accounts.
Image from today’s Chicago Tribune:
We’re still part of the family!
I hate to be a killjoy, but according to the caption in the Tribune story, that photo is from 2017.
The pending merger comes as traditional news media struggle to navigate the digital age, and the Chicago market is roiled by ownership changes, downsizing and declining revenue. Moving the Sun-Times to a nonprofit model follows the path of the Salt Lake Tribune, the first major daily newspaper to make the transition in 2019.
I wonder if the nonprofit status is a good thing or a bad thing for the board. Anybody know anything about nonprofits?
Isn’t the Tampa Bay Times also a non-profit newspaper, since 1977? I know it’s owned by a non-profit, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
The article has this also.
Moving the Sun-Times to a nonprofit model follows the path of the Salt Lake Tribune, the first major daily newspaper to make the transition in 2019.
I have no idea if it helped or hindered in that case.
I assume it’s not as simple as a nonprofit doesn’t care if a message board loses money every year because they don’t expect to make a certain amount of profit. But I know zero about how nonprofits work.
I don’t, either, though I know that several newspapers have been looking at such models, because they are struggling to survive, and many for-profit companies in the newspaper business have been slashing staff and services as they look to wring profits out of their papers.
For example, the Chicago Tribune (and other papers under Tribune Publishing) was sold to a hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, in 2021, after a last-ditch attempt to form a not-for-profit ownership group failed. Alden (which is now one of the largest newspaper operators in the U.S.) is infamous for cost-cutting, and many of the Tribune’s most respected journalists and columnists had their contracts bought out within days of the sale.
Whether a non-profit owner, like WBEZ, is good or bad for an ancillary service like the SDMB isn’t clear, but it certainly seems like a way to keep newspapers from becoming an even hollower shell of their former selves than they already are, if not entirely extinct.
I’m a lifetime member of a non-profit. My gut feeling is there would be many advantages to the SDMB being a non-profit. The biggest one I can think of is we could in theory far easier raise money as needed. An active membership is invaluable for such.
If it qualified as a tax benefit all the better. My group is a 501C3. We count as such.
Thanks for the explanation. I knew papers were closing/being bought out like crazy, but this is the first time I knew that nonprofits were in the game. It makes me think the board isn’t first on the cutting block.
Good point. I guess all the pledge drive jokes weren’t far off! I have no doubt that if it came down to it, raising the money would be doable.
Sadly, this thread forces me to revive my older thread on the same subject
Are we doomed? Will the SDMB survive undernew ownership?
and from that thread–one post in particular:
Let’s all hope that I and Dallas_Jones are wrong.
Please, Cecil–say it ain’t so.
No inside information, but I doubt the new owners would be too quick to shut us down. Also there is actually still some hope of bringing back the column. If so the SDMB would surely stay.
A non-profit can be more creative in raising money to keep us going. That alone is a help.
Or we may continue to survive through benign neglect, meaning they ignore us. I think the board is insignificant compared to the Sun Times newspaper and they’re going to be busy dealing with that.