No New Is Bad News

I'm going to do that thing where I cheat and refer to a Twitter thread, but the Twitter user (Alec MacGillis from ProPublica) was quoting a New York Review of Books article called Can Journalism Be Saved? that discussed more than a dozen books on the topic. The article was written by Nicholas Lemann, a professor at and former dean of the Columbia ­Graduate School of Journalism:

"By 2016 Google was making about four times the advertising revenue of the entire American newspaper industry."

This article by Nicholas Lemann may be the best summary I've read of the present crisis in local/metro journalism so I'm gonna quote a bunch from it.

"Employment in newspaper newsrooms decreased by 60 percent from 1990 to 2016. Circulation has declined from 62.5 million in 1968 to 34.7 million in 2016, while the population was increasing by 50 percent. Between 2007 and 2016, ad revenue declined from $45.4 billion to $18.3 billion."

"The Baltimore Sun has reduced its editorial staff from a peak of *400 in the late 1990s to 80 today*. [emphasis mine] The Boston Globe has reduced its staff from more than 500 to fewer than 285. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is down from more than 530 to fewer than 150."

"A full-page print ad in [the LA Times] cost about $50K; a digital ad that reached an equivalent audience cost about $7,000; a Google-generated ad that appeared on the Times’s website—auctioned to the advertiser through a Google system the Times had joined—might bring the paper $20."

"As a company the New York Times generates profit margins of just below 10 percent, compared to Facebook’s nearly 40 percent (the Times’s annual net income in 2018 was $126 million, versus Facebook’s $22 billion)."

Read the whole article. It's nuanced and candid about the glory days of journalism and it offers a possible way forward.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with this coda: Jeff Bezos (whose company is now also profiting hugely off ad revenue) just paid more for two properties in southern California ($255 million) than he did for the entire Washington Post.

The full article is worth reading. I especially appreciated the quotes from Michael Schudson's book Why Journalism Still Matters, pointing out that what I tend to think of as journalism's proper role in American society was only with us for a fairly short period of time in the 20th century in a particular set of economic circumstances. I also welcome the suggested solutions, at the end of the article, to fund some level of original reporting.
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I've written before about the burning business model that is news.