and now for something completely different

this, this, this and this, as well as innumerable others, confirm that the new york times company is in serious trouble, and that it is not alone. there is serious speculation that the print edition of the times here and the one in la, the boston herald (a new york times subsidiary), the washington post and the chicago tribune will all be nixed by the end of the year. the times has been having a fire sale over the past month to keep itself from keeling over dead: it's gotten desperate enough to pawn its office, its share in the tribune and new york's long-time rivals, the red sox. since september of last year its stock has lost 66% of its value--from 15.25 to just 5.10 today--forcing it to slash dividend payments by 75%. it has $625 million in long-term debt, and a $400 million credit line that's been maxed and is demanding repayment. to top it off, they've seen advertising revenue plunge (down 17.6% in the fourth quarter) along with circulation.

at least they're still a full-fledged paper, unlike the washington post and the la times. that paper has recently announced that, in order to save money, it will no longer carry an la section. that's right: it is too expensive for the la times to report on la. only from the national circuit can it afford to squeeze out a few measly dimes. the post has decided to put the kaibosh on its independent book review, and will be collapsing it, along with several other sections, into a more compact version of its standard daily. that, by the way, leaves the united states with only one, independent book review weekly: the new york review of books. one book review in a nation of 300 million people.

and that brings me to my point, which concerns but one of the many dooms leveled on us by the recession: the metamorphosis of news media. now, it has been obvious for many years that printed dailies were, at some point on the ever-darkening horizon, to become extinct. the fact of the matter is that people don't read newspapers anymore. now, you may protest, citing your own readership and that of your friends, but admit, before you do, that your committment to a particular periodical is casual at best. it is therefore also useless to the paper in maintaining its financial solvency. newspapers are dependent on advertising, and advertising revenues are in turn dependent on circulation. the individual cost of a newspaper is insignificant: for arguments sake, the times is $1.25 on the stand, and circulates about a 1,000,000 issues a day. it should be quite clear that the price of the thing is a drop in the bucket.

circulation is instead important because advertisers pay for exposure. specifically, they pay x fee for y number of copies sold. as circulation contracts, so does the artery that pumps blood into the sagging corpse of the newspaper. what are the dailies to do? the culprit here is, naturally, the internet, leading most papers towards some sort of web-based solution. the times, for instance, is contemplating charging for access to its webpage. the first problem with that idea is that it risks alienating times readers. it's easy to skip to another newspaper's website, one that's free of charge, in order to get your daily digest of headlines--and i suspect that most readers never get past the biggest font on the page. qualitative expectations of journalism have clearly fallen, as statistical evidence pointing to a near total end to fact-checking, and a subsequent rise in spurious reporting, confirms. it's doubtful, then, that a paper's reputation (though i think that the times is a shit rag, it is, unfortunately, one of the least shitty rags in the american bucket) can command as much respect in terms of marketing as can the cost of accessing its information. and as the cost of access is competed downwards and advertising revenues go with it--web ads are already a paltry source of cash--we have news organizations once more forced into a crunch. alternatives, such as diversification, have led most of the holding companies into what i call "japanese syndrome": they do a thousand things and lose money on all of them. the future isn't immediately bright.

the implication for journalism is that there will be an even more serious reducation in quality as papers find some way to keep costs in line with returns. and what is the most expensive part of making the news? making it good. fox news, having avoided this problem, is looking peachy--profit was only down 50% for the final quarter--compared to, let's say, the venerable tribune company, which went before a delaware bankruptcy judge two days ago. the integrity and, to be frank, utility of the news is almost assuredly going to fall as long as the news remains relatively expensive to make well. the internet is certainly no refuge for those in search of a new journalistic spirit. flim-flam abounds and fact-checking? blogs belong to a single person or to a small collection, at best. what kind of oversight could their possibly be? we don't even edit this blog (though we should). and besides, blogs just recycle what the news media reports, anyway. the best they've come up with is interesting insights in the form of commentary. exegesis is great, and all, but it's nothing without the text to gloss.

i remember reading a report filed last year that cited evidence that 75% of figures in british media went unverified, and that advertisers used the british press association like a ventriloquist's dummy. this is is the perennial problem: the bottom line. people are going where the money is. in the united states, as with every other sort of public service, we've decided decided that provisioning money for a public media service is a sin. somehow, it leads to socialism, just like, you know, the bbc did for stalin's britain. since we can't contribute to something like that, what are our options? where do good journalists go when they aren't allowed to see white house records, they can't spend more than a few days abroad, there's no space for literary criticism except to flog bestsellers, and, to top it off, the public wouldn't know a punchy, intelligent piece if it, well, punched them in the wing-wang? i'm willing to believe that something can be done, and i'd even be interested in doing it. as is all to evident, i must concede, i don't know what that it could be.