What kind of newspaper are you talking about? Conservative tabloids (e.g. The Washington Times) that you might see at your parents’ house? We take in the L.A. Times, and while every so often there will be an op-ed piece with a surprisingly conservative slant, I’m not seeing any exaltation of the Tea Party, nor anything about “queeros”.
On the other hand if you live in a relatively conservative area then maybe that would account for it. To a certain extent, it’s reasonable to expect a newspaper to reflect the values of its readership. But even so I’d rather see kneejerk reactionism such as you appear to have read about challenged rather than exalted.
Meh. Gannett’s own business model was to pare down news staff to the bone, so I’m not sure what difference it makes. Baby Boomers have killed off newspapers.
That local paper I mentioned above was bought out by Gannett, and the staff slashed. Enough so that some of them went out and started their own competing local newspaper.
If Gannett gets bought out and further slashed, maybe the other paper can pick up a few reporters.
I worked for Hearst Corp. for years at the SF Chronicle (earlier for the SF Examiner when they owned that). There is truly something to be said for a family-held corporation. They lost millions when they bought the Chronicle (mostly poor timing vs. the internet) but they hung on and refused to sell, and now they are turning a small profit there. Ordinary shareholders would not have sat still for that for even one year, let alone the 13 or 14 years it took to shake things out and settle into their current condition. So you can also say that corporation shareholders killed newspapers by their demands for unrealistic profits no matter what.
Those who have seen the Chronicle lately will understand that it is a shadow of its former self, but at least it isn’t being gutted for its assets, in fact Hearst is still investing in this property.
It’s odd that Gannett will stop using AP stories, videos and images beginning March 25 when they have a contract through the end of the year. But it has signed an agreement with Reuters. Cheaper?
My local paper is a McClatchy publication. Since McClatchy got bought out in 2020, they’ve cut publication to three days a week, moved printing out of town, switched to delivering the paper by mail instead of delivery people, paywalled everything on the website including stuff they used to provide for free as a public service (e.g. restaurant health inspection reports) and their Facebook feed is nothing but clickbait stuff from wire services that has nothing to do with our area.
The local subreddit is a more reliable way of finding out what’s going on in town these days.
The fundamental problem for local newspapers is that they relied on a monopoly on all information, and that’s utterly impossible to maintain today. Most people never cared about corruption at city hall, they just wanted the weather, the TV listings, the grocery coupons, the movie times, the classified ads, the sports scores, etc. The Internet (and even cable TV) created better places to get that kind of basic nuts-and-bolts information, so now the only people who subscribe are people who earnestly care about journalism, and that’s not enough to pay for a lot of journalism, so newspapers end up in a death spiral.
