(If you like, see on page 2 of this story, old tale called, “The King Who Demanded Too Much Tribute without Having Earned It By His Good Works”
“Election 2008, RIP, The Death of Newspapers”
That was the headline I wrote in Aug 2008, and the text for that TMV article is in the CODA below. (I never finished that article because a loved one of our family was suddenly diagnosed with an horrible terminal disease. Day and night then, hospital became focus of all life.)
It’s not the same, but The Chicago Trib, ‘a beloved family member’ to hundreds of thousands of readers in Illinois, Chicago in particular, has been hemorrhaging internally for some time, but especially since a sale last year to billionaire Samuel Zell, who took the newspaper private.
The Tribune Company, The Chi Trib’s owner, as well as owner of LAT (Los Angeles Times) and other newspapers says today it is deep in the hole to the tune an astronomical amount of shekels.
(WSJ online)
(NYT on how new billionaire owner appears to have structured debt for tax breaks, and now cant pay up.)
The Tribune Company, another conglomerate like Scripps (who owns The Rocky Mountain News in Denver… and put The Rocky up for ‘somebody, anybody buy me puleeeze’ fire sale this week…not to mention that the Miami Herald is up for sale this week also)… owns Wrigley Field, for heaven’s sake, and The Chicago Cubs… The old guys from The Loop outward along Lake Michigan north, south and west, have an irreversible every-morning tradition: “How yous guys doin’ today? How ’bout dem Cubs, boy o boy?”.
The Tribune Company also owns another icon: WGN, Chicago... the flagship radio station that any and everyone in their right and wrong minds in the Midwest and beyond listens/ed to for at least one decade of their life. Sharp programming; local talk that was intelligent. Used to have radio dramas. News reporters, not just vapid news-readers. To lose WGN would be like losing the dome off the Capitol.
To lose the Chi Trib would be like losing the Capitol itself.
To lose Wrigley and the Cubs would be like losing the ancient tribal game and sacred place passed down from generation to generation of grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.
But the news is there: Chi Trib barreling toward Chap 11 bankruptcy.
My two cent’s worth while watching the unprecedented and unabashed ‘in the tank’ contortions of many newspapers for one candidate or another during 08 presidential elections… was that this was the irrevocable sign that newspapers were on their last and only chance to raise a lot of capital.
That MSM were bleeding bad; that even wearing a binder and trying to walk as though not wounded… the sweat was dripping off mustaches and brows, the eyes red-rimmed, the skin gray-pale. In Elections 08, the big newspapers went where the money was, many overthrowing what many had previously thought of as a commitment to journalistic integrity. You could see it unfurl daily: too many journos from the ‘big guys’ no longer finding and telling the stories, but shaping them, in some cases creating strangely biased stories, instead. Predictably so. It didn’t appear altruistic: altruistic would have been to expose Freddie, Fannie, AIG, Bear Stearns, et al, long long ago. Instead, it appeared opportunistic.
It was bad. Both the hemorrhage, and the pandering.
Now that the fatted calf (campaign funds for unprecedented spending on newspaper advertising) phase of the election is over… so are many of the newspapers.
Here’s the thing about hemorrhaging… you have to determine the cause and stop it. Stop it utterly. Immediately. Not later, not after a while. Not while going on two spa vacations for executive at the cost over nearly half a million dollars. (No one will EVER explain that to our satisfaction, never.) Immediately. You can transfuse and transfuse– 8, 10, 20 pints of blood, the best platelets, the richest red brew straight I.V– it wont do any good if the siphoning-off keeps going on. And on. And on.
Lesson is the same for auto industry, insurance industry, banks, newspapers, magazines, book publishers. The same. Hemorrhage of this kind did not happen last week or last year; it has been going on for years, for decades in publishing and newspaper and media conglomerates where those at the top aren’t watching, cant run the show with even the common sense of a mom and pop hot dog stand in the park on Sunday.
Mom and pop: Big business… Same principles. Same. Absolutely the same. Overhead, income … the first less than the last. Suppliers and workers get paid first. Owners get paid last. Not first. Have to put money aside weekly for capital investment. For R and R, and for R&D. Do aging studies on the hot dog cooker and rolling stock. Often owners don’t get paid. Just plow it all back into capital investment. Simple. Sane. Not hard to think it through.
But: With many of our biggest companies: didn’t happen. What was missing? The smarts? I’d say something overwhelmed intelligence.
There’s only seven deadly things that are traditionally said to overwhelm intelligence, and they are these:
sloth, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, wrath and pride. Which of the seven could/would/ is the culprit?
It seems as I have watched the newspapers go down over the years, that the source of more and more hemorrhage is often too many living like parasitic kings at the log-rolling ‘top’, not just skimming the cream, but scooping out all the monetary gains all the way to the bottom of the can … and not enough empowerment of those in the middle of the pyramid or at the bottom to invent, innovate, wow the world…. not enough resource for them, not enough.
Those in the middle and the bottom of newspapers/ publishers/programmers/ sales are the ones who generate the riches. Any king or set of kings taking all, not profit, but incoming revenues! for oneself and leaving just not even barely enough resource for the inventors and innovators … that’s what has hastened purposeful arterial lacerations to publishers of newspapers, books and magazines. That, and some owners of media conglomerates borrowing ba-jillions of dollars to buy/ capitalize the newspaper supposedly, but without real ability to repay it given the last 16 quarters reports alone. But, the tax deduction for such matters makes the entire endeavor more than curious.
The King Who Demanded Too Much Tribute without Having Earned It By His Good Works
My grandmother used to tell about how in olden times, the way to kill a culture, was for the kings to demand phenomenal
amounts of tribute in grain and gold, horses and slaves, and thereby to leave the people with bare bones or nothing. This went on until there was not enough seed left for the people to plant, no new children born for there were no females of bearing age left in the villages, no new colts born for the king took all the stallions; no gold to offer the king, for he took all the able men as slaves, and the old women were too old to mine. In the end, the greed of those ‘to have it all’ so they could live like kings, also destroyed the would-be kings… as they had destroyed the lives of the people from whom they forced tribute… until there was no more tribute left to give.
The death of newspapers is not on the hands of those who worked there; not the good guys who ran the roller presses of old, the stevedores, the printmen, the folder machinists, the journalists, the ad people, the assistants… all the rest.
No. It was not them.
The exsanguinations was initiated by, and sustained by a mind set of a would-be set of kings... that wanted to dress as, have the men and ladies in waiting of, the care of their children, the keeping of their houses, the world travel of, the jewels of, the appointments and accoutrements of, the fabulous privileges of, old-style kings who took from this treasury to stock that treasury, never in balance, ever raiding and depleting their own people.
Not Medieval thinking. Dark Ages. Y antes, and even before that. You can count on it: without people of sight and voice to push back at the beginning and the middle, the ancient stories of mayhem and failing, as well as all their deleterious characters smell the unconsciousness here, and are still born back into our modern world, again and again.
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CODA
Below is the article, or, I mean, as far as I got with it in Aug 08. It was never completed. I put it here because I thought that #3 containing some thoughts from my Catholic Latin background, might be interesting to readers who perhaps, like me, keep trying to understand not just why/ what, but how. How these matters come about seems to be quintessential to intervening in useful ways. Even belatedly. Economics is not just about numbers. As more, often more, it is about human nature; its foibles, its good vision.
I’ve been an avid reader of the CJR (Columbia Journalism Review), the AJR, Editor & Publisher, PW (Publisher’s Weekly), CHE (Chronicle of Higher Education) and now Booksense, for two decades. I began reading them as a book author and as a trustee of two universities… mainly to find out ‘the real deal’ that is, the hidden matters behind the scenes in publishing….commercially, in newspapers, academically, etc.
If you read broadly across all these journals (some are daily online now, some are weekly in print or monthly) you definitely get the picture, starting in 1980s with the several contretemps in the Sulzberger family (re NYT) and the appearance of Rupert the Great (Murdoch), Summer, The Big Red, and the Newhouse brothers (Random House) selling out to Germany’s Mohn family which now owns more than 50% of all of USA’s formerly venerable big NY publishing houses…. that newspapers, book publishing, radio and television and cable would be, could be, should be, soon on life support… or DNR orders. I have to say, to watch the fall of these once grand empires of experienced, lauded, and hard-working storytellers is terribly saddening.
“Election 2008, RIP, The Death of Newspapers”
The Downward Spiral
Advertising was only one of the Lacerations:
–From crabbed (in print newspapers) to expandable (online):
–From one time ads (print) to infinite ads (online):
–From time limited (print) to time-sensitive (online).
–From local or national coverage (print), to worldwide at the click of a mouse (online).
–Much higher cost for more coverage (print), about same cost whether local or world wide the broadcast of the ad (online).
1. Perhaps this ‘walking dead but just hasn’t fallen over yet’ situation with daily print newspapers began in earnest more than two decades ago with newspapers, large and small hemorrhaging from loss of huge ‘repetitive ad’ revenues re ad markets they used to hold a monopoly in:
real estate listings, help wanted ads, services for sale, items for sale and haul away, book publicity from major book publishers– whose marketing budgets used to run in the millions of dollars each year–, as well as the fur, yacht, and luxury trade diminishing …as advertisers moved to Craig’s List, Angie’s list, Freecycle, and especially personal and corporate websites, gorgeous in color and time-sensitive, with expandable/unlimited pages… driven by email contacts, customer lists and world-wide web advertising.
2. Loss of Once Gigantic Gatekeeper Status: deciding which news stories would be placed on front page, below the fold, buried, dismissed, allow to rot out of sight. Internet bloggers and citizen reporters created huge breaches in newspaper’s walls from which the newspapers, slow, filled with ‘old tech’ minds, could not defend themselves. Multiple lacerations.
3. Ancient Deadly Sins that Have Caused the Downfall of Cultures and Economies
Luxuria: unlimited appetite for extravagance; acedia: refusal to work/pay justly; ira, self-righteous, self-protective anger; superbia, believing oneself the heir of everything existent, to have no fault, to be right even in the face of facts to the contrary; gula/ gargantia… wanting to always be stuffed full with goods/ money, fame/; avarita, wanting to accumulate endlessly; vainglory, wallowing in material goods or false honors; auto dolor, taking the martyr’s position, feeling sorry for oneself, attempting to act the victim to cover one’s role as neglector or persecutor; ex venire, to prevent goodness, solidity, solvency, to destroy the vessel or bleed the endeavor til it dies… ex venire, to prevent a coming, to prevent a birth or a rebirth. Arterial lacerations
4. The Antidotes from Ancient Times
What can live that can live: what will die that must die.