From Jeff Jacoby’s column in today’s (online) Boston Globe:
Newspapers are in extremis not because of their political agenda, but because the world around them has been transformed. The growth of the Internet has left the traditional newspaper business model, with its vast physical plant and expensive armies of writers, editors, photographers, pressmen, mailers, truck drivers, and salesmen, in a shambles. Craigslist and its ilk have vaporized what used to be most papers’ greatest profit center: classified advertising. A decades-long trend of falling readership, brought on by the rise of television, has been accelerated to warp speed by the explosion of websites and blogs offering news and opinion on every conceivable subject, 24 hours a day – and usually for free.
Meanwhile, the same paper reports that the Globe and the Boston Newspaper Guild have reached a deal. Both sides are leaking talking points reserving comment until union leaders meet with their membership.
The “lifetime guarantee” provisions have apparently been modified. The unions — and the rest of the workers at the Globe — have taken an enormous hit on the chin, in the gut, and probably downstairs as well.
I hope that we who love journalism can grieve these losses now, so that we can then heal them and move on to demonstrate a better online alternative.
Readership in general is probably down. Media that is able to generate more entertaining headlines and outrage are able to generate more interest and sales.
<
p>The Globe needs more “space aliens”, “sex scandals” and public outrage stories on the cover.