As media giants continue to gobble up smaller competitors it is no surprise that the quality of journalism in the United States continues to decline. One reason, and maybe the simplest explanation, is that these megacorporations have an unquenchable thirst for profits.
Today, two major newspaper companies announced that they are axing more reporters and editors in order to keep profits up.
No wonder then that newspapers like the N.Y. Times and the Washington Post are hesitant to report on the failings of the White House: with a business strategy that emphasizes mergers and acquisitions over serving readers, these companies will not risk having a new administration take over that will restrain their appetite for media consolidation. (more details below).
New York Times Cutting 500 Jobs – 4 Percent of Its Work Force – in Effort to Reduce Costs
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times Co. said Tuesday it would cut about 500 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force, as part of an ongoing effort to reduce costs. The reductions come atop another 200 jobs that were cut earlier this year.
The Times said it expected 250 jobs at its main newspaper group to be affected, which includes the Times, the International Herald Tribune and the online operation of the Times. Of those job cuts, about 45 will come from the Times’ newsroom, the company said in a statement.
In a memo to staff, executive editor Bill Keller wrote: “None of you will be surprised to learn that the economic pressures on our business have been unrelenting. While we’re in better shape economically (and much stronger journalistically) than our competitors, our revenues have not grown sufficiently to keep up with the growing costs of everything the company does.”
The New York Times Company reported a net income (profit) of $292 million for 2004.
—
In the meantime, at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, 100 more editorial jobs will be eliminated. The newspapers are owned by Knight -Ridder a company known both for the excellence of some if its reporting, and the profits demands of its chairman, Tony Ridder.
Editor & Publisher, the trade journal for the newspaper industry, interviewed former Philly editor Gene Roberts concerning the buyouts.
Roberts, who ran the Inquirer from 1972 to 1990 — during which the paper won 17 Pulitzer Prizes — saw things differently. He called today’s plan “suicidal.”
“Long range, it will hurt both papers and cause immediate problems at the Daily News,” he told E&P. “They are staffed at rock-bottom already.”
In his book on the company, Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy at Risk, Davis Merritt explained some of the pitfalls of modern newspapering:
When newspapers become public companies, the business side sets profit goals, and editors have to meet them. They try: They plump up their “sof t” coverage of food, fashion, lifestyles, homes, and cars to appeal to baby-boomers and advertisers. They cut hard news, especially foreign news. They cut staff.
Ridder is known to be obsessed with Wall Street expectations. Notes Roberts in E&P: “It is not a question of losing money,” he said. “It is a question of operating margins.”
Knight-Ridder recorded a net income of $326 million dollars in 2004, up 10% from 2003.
—
Politicians can sleep well tonight knowing the media companies are doing what they can to prevent the news from slipping out to the public.
Sickening.
It used to be that many of the best newspapers were owned by families who operated them as businesses, yes, but also as a kind of public trust, as a way to serve the larger community.
Now, the suits want a 20% ROI to keep up with Wall Street projections.
Trouble is, it’s a labor-intensive business. Eliminate the people who do the work and the product suffers. But when you run a business that’s only about profit and not quality, who cares? <snarl>
Gah, this sucks in so many ways:
the shores of the 21st century. One of the many modern fundamentals that appear to be inconceivable to the framers is our time in which a skeptical, informative press capable of informing the whole electorate would be economically infeasible.
There’s no fix for this within the system as it stands because the media are private property and its owners are protected against the people and the rest of society by property, speech and press rights.
Something fundamental has to change.
Actually, a skeptical press has ALWAYS been economically unviable. However, there is no longer either a functional opposition party or a large enough body of concerned and involved citizens willing and able to bear the costs of running that skeptical press for its own purposes.
Making it worse, the corporate sector which once operated news centers as a loss leader, a mark of good citizenship, has decided that it no longer needs or wants to waste its precious money giving back to the community… it’s far more profitable, short run, to be the barons of a feudal economy than members of a thriving democracy. Long run, of course, we’re all dead.
And, too, the corporate press has access to environmental and economic data which the rest of us may or may not see and cannot influence significantly; perhaps they have a clearer vision of the long term,or lack of a long term, which gives them their “grab while the grabbin’s good” outlook.
The rise of the “corporate media” is an interesting case, being both a symptom of a larger problem AND in many ways the cause of it. (Much like the Bush administration, which not only makes life immeasurably worse but draws support from near half the populace to do so.)
The inmates are, in straight fact, running the asylum.
Blogs are a start at sorting things out, of course, but they’ve got limits and issues of their own.. I’m still trying to figure out an answer that works.