Due to media consolidation along with general business consolidation, most press organs are not independent profit centers, they are PR departments for ownership interests who would rather let them die than tell the truth about anything material.

Sucking is who they are, it's what they do. Sucking is their job. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, sucking isn't everything, it's the only thing.

And THAT'S their REAL bottom line.

but the pew research group or whatever they call themselves did a poll [several polls over the years, really] -- for the past couple of decades, a consistent 20% of americans want [as their first priority] hard news in their papers and 5% want fluff [i forget what the rest of the percentages are, sports, local, etc, probably] but the newspapers have consistently been increasing their fluff and decreasing their hard news.

my take -- it's worked up to this point because fluff is fast easy and cheap to produce, but investigative reporting and real analysis are both expensive and time-consuming, and we were willing to put up with the increasing amount of fluff in return for the ever-decreasing tidbits of real news -- and they have finally reached the point of diminishing returns.

Yeah, people want a good steak dinner, but they are getting twinkies and ho-hos. I think people are getting tired of feeling like crap.

My local paper is cutting and cutting in the newsroom, they've literally cut the paper down in size, and there are fewer and fewer hard news stories, and it recently went up in price 50 cents. The local/state section, that should be at least as large as the recent news section is now literally the front and back of a page the rest filled with ads. All this while they've been tweaking the living/life (fluff section) for a few years now as if I care much about its layout and content.

I simply don't see how it's going to survive, because I'm considering giving it up altogether, and I've read the thing religiously, but it's no longer of any real use to me besides sentimental value.

by Fred Clark over at Slacktivist, who works in the newspaper industry, talks about the recent cuts to papers, and the record profits their parent companies are raking in.

We have all bought the line, that the news sucks these days, because it is losing money. But it's not losing money. It's making money, record profits even. It's not supposed to make money like that though, that's what's really wrong with our papers, is that their owners are trying to get them to turn profits that papers were never meant to turn.

I read a newspaper every day starting when I was about 12. Even when I got too busy with work to read it every day (and when it was easier to check headlines on the net), I still subscribed to my city paper - wherever I happened to live - on weekends. The LA Times found a way to break me of the habit I'd had since I was 12. The way they did it was by sucking.

I stopped subscribing to the LA Times because they pay Jonah Goldberg, one of the stupidest fucking people on the planet, to write columns but don't have the money to publish a full size book review anymore (a book review which was one of the better ones published, btw). Oh, and they did a puff piece on Ken Starr. Which wasn't a surprise given the winger Chicago sent out to be publisher at the Times. And, not surprisingly, after cutting staff (and quality) and moving the paper to the right - a brilliant strategy for a left-leaning city - the paper's incoming cash dwindled.