
How a Newspaper Dies - spking
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/13/denver-post-profits-newspaper-industry-218360
======
patrickg_zill
25 years ago Wired (which at that point was a pretty good magazine) published
Michael Crichton's speech on the future of newspapers, Mediasaurus:
[https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/](https://www.wired.com/1993/04/mediasaurus/)

And it seems like not much has changed...

Concerning the Denver Post, I realized long ago that the function of the local
newspaper was selling ads, and only looking at approved scandals.

There was plenty of fraud going on in the site choosing, site bidding and
construction of the new Denver International Airport ; and the Denver Post
never investigated any of it. Some improbably large amount of concrete was
paid for during the construction of the airport, and I don't think that it was
because of the alien underground base... a simpler and more logical
explanation for this has to do with large bags of cash...

EDIT: Note that the best journalism you can find on it, was done by Westword,
which used to have escort/gay/gentlemen's club ads in the back and was given
away free (they now are making $$$ because all the ad space is bought by
marijuana advertisers). [http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-
evil-5056426](http://www.westword.com/news/speak-no-evil-5056426)

~~~
dredmorbius
Or Hamilton Holt, 1909.

 _[T]his is the explanation of the condition that confronts most publications
to-day. By throwing the preponderating weight of commercialism into the scales
of production, advertising is at the present moment by far the greatest menace
to the disinterested practice of a profession upon which the diffusion of
intelligence most largely depends. If journalism is no longer a profession,
but a commercial enterprise, it is due to the growth of advertising, and
nothing else._

[https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft](https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft)

~~~
intended
Essentially advertising has become a threat to the old models of how ideas and
the market place of ideas are supposed to work.

Advertising subsidized many functions, and then it became the purpose of those
functions.

Ads are the threat.

~~~
dredmorbius
How old is "the marketplace of ideas", exactly?

~~~
intended
Forever? The modern form in my opinion, is an enlightenment era creation.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/23559183](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23559183)

[https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol33/iss1/1/](https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol33/iss1/1/)

~~~
intended
Can’t read the jstor art but the duke art is in line with what I have said.

------
rmason
Our local (Lansing) paper has a full section on national news and another on
sports which are both dated and stale. Add in another section of USA Today
which is both dated and stale.

I want just local news. In depth pieces on sports that go beyond the score.
Our excellent minor league baseball team, the Lugnuts, isn't covered by our
paper at all!

Add in investigative journalists covering politics and local university. Heck
the biggest story at the university in fifty years was broken by the
Indianapolis paper hundreds of miles away.

I think if the paper did all those things and updated the mobile app more than
once every three days they could triple the number of subscribers.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The problem is that sports and national news is super cheap and easy. You just
pick and choose a few articles from AP that sell across the country.
Investigative journalism is expensive, local journalism has a tiny audience
which makes it expensive.

Would you pay the same amount for a newspaper that only had the current
quantity of local and investigative news? Or would you pay a lot more for one
that had the desired amounts?

It's like lamenting that your burger has a thin beef patty, a mountain of
fries and a large soda that's half ice: you paid $5 for the meal, plus the
overhead, they can't put $4 worth of beef in it so it's mostly filler.

Also, Lugnuts drool. Whitecaps rule!

~~~
rmason
Yes they're defaulting to easy and putting out an inferior product. I'm
willing to pay the same for a smaller paper that contains more of what I want.

More importantly could you double or triple the number of subscribers? I don't
have an easy way of knowing for sure unless someone tries it. They could have
fewer ads but charge more for them if they can get more subscribers in the
18-36 range.

I admit with the economics of actually printing the paper it might make more
financial sense to go entirely digital. Sadly I haven't seen anyone do that
successfully.

------
mngthrowaway
Disclaimer: I work for media news group. I can look out the windows in that
pic from my desk.

While the article is true, it doesn't show the whole picture. Alden capital
recognized an opportunity: Hundreds of newspapers with brand recognition and
skilled employees. While the newspaper will die, these two things can be used
to make money / slow the death a bit.

The solution is "adtaxi". All the MNG newspapers act as local sales people,
account managers, etc and use their local newspapers brand recognition to
generate sales. Adtaxi is the digital fulfillment agency - so newspapers can
sell social, search, and programmatic advertising.

This is a growing chunk of each newspapers revenue, but something I haven't
seen mentioned. If Alden capital really wanted to make money, they'd recognize
the viability of this model to scale, and that would in turn save newspapers.
The problem is newspapers are stuck with tons of old employees, old money, and
old ways of doing things. They don'y want digital to save them, they'd rather
die doing what they know.

~~~
subpixel
The solution you describe is actually the problem the article points out: MNG
is killing the actual newspapers they are making money operating.

------
zandjager
Anyone remembers something akin to "TV tax" ? It was a tax paid to sustain
national TV (media) in a large scale, which provides them the possibility of
being independent and not struggle with financing problems. It is simple, and
it works, but I guess it's not an option anymore. Without a guaranteed
unbiased source of money we cannot claim to have independent news or news that
serves global interests (with global meaning the pool of contributors which in
this case is close to global). Local news are not interesting. If you want to
know what happened in your neighborhood, go out and ask your neighbors, talk
to them.

~~~
gxs
This may not be the proper place to ask - but I'm generally disconnected from
the news cycle outside of tech and sports, mainly because I don't know of any
good, objective news sources.

Is there anything that you or anyone else on HN can recommend?

~~~
gnicholas
I built an app called Read Across The Aisle that offers a variety of news
sources across the political spectrum and has a timer that tracks the
aggregate political bias in your news consumption.

The app is free — and provides free access to the WSJ, thanks to a generous
partnership they offered us.

[http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com](http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com)

~~~
DuskStar
Have you considered collaborating with
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/) to expand
the list of analyzed sites?

~~~
gnicholas
Haven't heard of them before but will check it out. Thanks!

------
tschellenbach
It's not just newspapers. Journalism as a whole is shrinking rapidly. Concerns
over privacy and personalized advertising will have long terms impacts on ad
revenue. Ad revenue is the primary way through which journalism is funded.
Unless you have a great brand like the Economist, or the Wall Street Journal
you're in trouble. To do well you now have to write content that people are
willing to pay for. That's a pretty high bar to reach.

~~~
Karunamon
I'd add to this a somewhat controversial stance: I'm not sure that the world
needs or can sustain journalism as a job anymore.

Let me explain a bit. By "can sustain", I mean that the whole point of being a
journalist is objective reporting, with cultivating trust as a goal. Without
trust, a journalist is no better than a blogger with a writing degree. Except
I don't think that trust meaningfully exists anymore. Most news in the largest
nations is in the hands of a handful of gargantuan monied interests, and with
there being no legal obligation to divorce fact from opinion from advertising,
they probably will not, so long as not doing so remains as profitable as it
has been.

What's the substantial difference between a journalist you can't trust to
distill pertinent facts from events, and a random blogger you have no reason
to trust in the first place?

One makes more money. Maybe. Are you sure you didn't just read a native ad?

By "needs", I mean that faced with this loss of trust, individual people are
going to have to do what they should have been doing in the first place,
namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more attention to
subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It's a huge mistake to rely on media
credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that is the
entire concept of journalism as a career path.

~~~
cornholio
> _people are going to have to do what they should have been doing in the
> first place, namely choosing their news sources carefully and paying more
> attention to subtle and not-so-subtle bias. It 's a huge mistake to rely on
> media credentials as a proxy for likelihood of telling the truth, yet that
> is the entire concept of journalism as a career path._

Media credentials are a way to aggregate that trust on the long run and invest
decades into building a reputation of integrity. With the expectation that it
will be profitable in the future, people will come to rely on you because they
know how costly any damage to that reputation is to you.

In the model where every internet page is a source that has to vetted
individually, the journalists are indeed obsolete but not because they weren't
useful; now every citizen must do their own full journalistic investigations
before trusting anything written. Most people lack the skills and education to
do that work and society is, on the whole, worse off.

People will not be doing what "they should be doing in the first place", we
will get the misinformation soup that served us with Trump, Brexit, antivaxx
and the score of post-truth social ills.

~~~
anon1385
The MMR scare, which is the origin of a lot of the modern antivax movement,
was something that was largely created by (UK) newspapers[1]. This was back in
the 90s before the subsequent decline in revenue from advertising and
competition from online news; it wasn't something that happened due to lack of
resources to do fact checking- papers took an active decision to 'campaign' in
support of Wakefield and dedicated huge amounts of resources and column inches
to the topic. It wan't just a tabloid thing either, most of the media gorged
themselves on a festival of misinformation and emotive scare stories for years
after the original article had been retracted by most of the authors.

You really couldn't have picked a worse example.

Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs
after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_role)

~~~
repolfx
This sort of thing is why newspapers are going to die and good riddance.

Yes the MMR scare was bad reporting of bad science. But this:

 _Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it 's worth pointing out that it
occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the
EU._

... is just laughable. What you mean is that the UK media, rather unusually
for Europe, actually digs up dirt and reports negative stories about the EU.
You know, holding government to account, one of the primary functions of
journalism.

I've noticed lots of people in the rest of Europe like to describe the UK
media this way. I find it rather pathetic. Even the head of the EU Parliament
after the Brexit vote explained it by saying the people had been "brainwashed"
by the media.

The only reason it feels to them like the UK press runs a smear campaign
against the EU, is that supine and useless European newspapers are all
ideologically in bed with it and refuse to publish negative stories at all. I
read the German press sometimes and any article that at first may appear to be
criticising the EU invariably is actually criticising national governments,
often with an explicit or implied appeal to the EU to bring the elected
governments into line. EU supporters have got used to dog-like loyalty from
the press and act shocked when they read genuine, hard hitting criticism in
British newspapers.

~~~
pjc50
No, the UK press is disastrously bad about reporting the EU, to the extent
that the EU has its own huge rebuttals index:
[https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-
index/](https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/)

The rightwing UK press is extremely selective about what negative news it
reports about whom. It could and should be savaging the UK government for its
lack of Brexit planning but instead it's running articles labelling judges as
"TRAITORS".

~~~
repolfx
I'm aware of the EU's "myths" index. It's a joke. Most of them aren't even
rebuttals because they admit the stories are true. They're just blog posts
defending their own position.

Just scanning down the list for some recent examples, here's one from 2015:

[https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-
developmen...](https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/the-european-development-
fund-offers-aid-to-the-poorest-countries-in-forms-that-are-most-likely-to-
deliver-results-for-the-local-people/)

It says:

 _In a drive to have a go at the EU, on 20 July some UK newspapers (Daily
Telegraph, Daily Mail) chose to ridicule circus artists and coconut
production_

It then goes on to admit that the EU does fund trapeze and sewing courses in
Tanzania, but _" elaborate metaphors and frivolous choice of visuals aside,
mastering – to quote the articles – “the art of the trapeze” can open job
opportunities for a person in Tanzania (by the way, the same project also
provides courses in carpentry and sewing)."_

So this "myth" is in reality not a myth at all, the reports were true. The
Commission also managed to totally miss the point of the stories, namely, why
is the EU spending money on trapeze courses in Tanzania during a time when its
member governments _are cutting back on healthcare and welfare to their own
people_? Instead it posts a pretentious blog post in which it redefines facts
as "myths" and shits on journalists doing one of the things journalists are
meant to do: asking hard questions about government spending.

Here's another true "myth"

[https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/eu-funds-do-not-
favour-...](https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/eu-funds-do-not-favour-
bullfighting/)

 _" It appears the press are just as keen on recycling as the Commission. The
claim that British taxpayers are subsidising bullfighting in Spain was
published in The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror recently, some 18 months after a
strangely similar story appeared in The Daily Telegraph in May 2013."_

But indeed, the claim the papers made is once again completely true and the EU
doesn't deny it. Instead it simply claims that under the EU's own agriculture
subsidy rules they don't specify what the subsidies are used for, and so if
Spanish farmers choose to use the subsidies to rear bulls for bullfighting
that's got nothing to do with them. Except that, you know, they pay for it.

If the EU wants to tackle bad reporting about its own operations in the press,
then it needs to stick to cases where the press were actually wrong. It surely
does happen. Instead it published a blog that boils down to a big pile of
tetchyness, evasion, and slippery use of language - all paid for by the
taxpayer. You get the overwhelming impression the EU really doesn't get that
an aggressive press is a part of democracy; they see it as an opponent to be
defeated.

------
fredsanford
Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed
this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative
journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable.

~~~
Lionsion
> Most newspapers are filled with regurgitated press releases. When I noticed
> this, I stopped my subs. I grew up reading newspapers that had investigative
> journalists out in the field. Gov't was much more accountable.

That's a strategy that will get you more regurgitated press releases.

I still subscribe to a newspaper, but at this point I think of it like a
donation to a nonprofit. Journalism is important, and I think the people who
value it need to concentrate their resources to maintain and support the
organizations who will still do it.

However, now I'm going to have to make sure my money's not going to a private
equity vulture like this guy.

~~~
dublinben
You can give money directly to actual non-profit organizations that engage in
investigative journalism, like the Center for Investigative Reporting or
ProPublica.

~~~
Lionsion
Don't those nonprofits tend to focus on national issues? State and local
issues still need investigation.

------
mudil
It is tied to the invasion of privacy.

Facebook and Google control close to 85% of the digital ad market. The rest
15% goes to the content creators and to the journalism. If Google and FB were
not able to invade everyone's privacy, that would have created a level playing
field for national, regional, and specialized media to prosper. But because
they know who you are, they can display an ad for you on any platform. If you
are from Denver, here's an ad for a Denver event on your mobile game. So who
needs journalism if an article in Denver Post is on par to a Candy Crush
screen? Who needs quality content on the internet?

There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever!

Neither Google nor FB should be gathering personal information worse than NSA.
Personal information is personal, and free people in a free society should not
be followed by multinational corporations.

~~~
tschellenbach
The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An
even smaller budget for journalism.

There are indeed ethical concerns with this level of tracking. That doesn't
change that there's a flipside though. A lot of good journalism will have no
monetization model to rely on. Paid content only works for the top
publications that aim at a wealthier audience.

~~~
mudil
There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever. I
maintain a website since 2004 for doctors to learn about medical technologies,
i.e. new FDA approvals, interviews, product reviews, etc etc, like TechCrunch
for doctors. Fourteen years of every day reporting! We should be able to
sustain ourselves via ads, but we barely survive. Why? Because of the invasion
of privacy, because Google follows users, and it can display ads for doctors
on Candy Crush. So who needs journalism? Google doesn't.

~~~
mngthrowaway
You should get higher cpms (more revenue) because doctors/nurses read your
site - something that wouldn't necessarily occur without the invasion of
privacy.

If there wasn't an invasion of privacy, there would be no open marketplace for
buying ads, and small websites would have an incredibly difficult time filling
ad slots.

------
TangoTrotFox
Another related piece that can't be recommended enough is, "The Bad News About
the News" by Robert Kaiser. Kaiser was the managing editor of the Washington
Post pre-Bezos and spent more than 50 years at the paper working as both a
reporter and an editor. That time frame gives him an incredibly insightful
view on the decline of media and where it is inevitably headed.

[1] -
[http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...](http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-
news.html)

------
zeth___
>“The old model of a general-purpose newspaper fit the industrial age when
advertisers needed mass audiences to sell the products of mass production. But
the marketplace no longer supports the model of a few messages to many people.
Now it is many messages, each to a few people,” Meyer tells me via email.

The advertising as spying model is dying, too. The EU GDPR killed it in the
second largest market on the planet. It is a matter of political opportunity
for the same to happen in the US.

What we are seeing is the limit of advertising as a business model in general.

------
mc32
I wonder if the likes of nextdoor can take on journalism. They have a captive
audience with pretty good engamemt, maybe they could add local news through
local journalists, but who knows...

~~~
Analemma_
Nextdoor is awful. The only thing it's good for is learning just how many of
your neighbors will report "suspicious activity" when they see a black man
walking his dog. If that's the future of journalism, just let it die.

~~~
mc32
From what I’ve seen they have helped catch delivery thieves, prowlers; alerts
about lost and found, free stuff, car break-in’s miscellaneous activities,
both positive and negative.

I think they could try adding local news into their feed.

I’ve learned having an externally pointing sec cam is valuable in capturing
suspicious chars.

------
mathattack
If it's at all profitable to produce a newspaper with more than the bare
minimum writers, wouldn't a new paper start up after the last local one dies?
What am I missing?

~~~
PeterisP
It's profitable while there's a customer base that still (due to tradition,
habit, brand name) are willing to pay for an increasingly bad service. The
last paper dies when it has "spent" that customer base by motivating them to
change these habits, and at that point it won't be profitable for anyone ever
again.

------
fipple
The private equity guy is making all the money but he is not killing the
industry. The industry is dying because people don’t pay for ad-laden
newspapers that they leaf through carefully every morning. 184 journalists at
the Denver Post?! That needs more revenue than banner ads from Facebook
clicks.

------
paulddraper
Interesting timing; this was published day before Salt Lake Tribune (Utah)
laid off one-third the staff.

------
jillesvangurp
The problem is not saving the publishers and aggregators (aka. newspapers,
magazines, etc) but reinventing journalism. All major publications, including
the big ones, have been squeezing on journalistic quality.

There's a surplus of journalists that are either unemployed or peddling their
services writing freelance articles where they are payed by the word. That's
not sustainable in its current form but it might be the beginnings of
something new: offering these people a way to get revenue.

This business is essentially reputation driven; good journalists get payed
more and have an easier time getting their work published. Right now they do
this at fixed price by selling themselves to media syndicates that are taking
most of the profits for themselves. There seems to be no way other than
monetizing through largely ad driven media silos. This is a race to the
bottom. You get shit articles that offer confirmation bias to pre-selected
demographics based on what ads they can publish.

I'd gladly pay up for a netflix/spotify style news subscription model with a
fair distribution model. This would enable niche publications and journalists
to do their thing in the same way that niche artists and series are thriving
on spotify and netflix. But it would have to be an inclusive platform; I'm not
paying for a handful of big brand publications with some filler content that I
can get elsewhere for free. I want basically a good subset of all relevant
publications in the same way that most artists are on Spotify. I don't want to
have to micromanage subscriptions either. Just measure what I read, and how
long I read it, etc. and make sure the relevant copyright owners get their
cut. I want good journalists to get a fair cut of the earnings.

That's money the journalists are missing out on. I've not bought a news paper
in years, I have no online news subscriptions and never payed for paper
subscriptions. I also have an ad-blocker and routinely bypass naively
implemented paywalls with private browsers. That's billions of completely
untapped revenue potentially and none of it ad based. Enough to pay for the
work of tens of thousands of journalists. At 5$/month, 20 million subscribers
is about 1 billion in revenue, which at a generous 100K per year could pay for
10K journalists. I'd say a good enough platform can easily do better than that
in just the US alone.

~~~
TheCondor
10k journalists and your most popular articles are going to be about the
Kardashians, what celebrities wore to an awards show and what celebrity couple
is splitting up. Maybe Lebron pokes in to the top 10.

Journalism is like science, an entire career might have a few interesting
publications if you’re lucky, something really big is like winning the
lottery. Current society isn’t designed to appreciate that kind of hit ratio.
There is all sorts of low grade grift and corruption in business and politics
but there aren’t enough big scandals to keep the kardashians out of our
papers.

~~~
jillesvangurp
That's the case right now; except I don't read any of that. To get my money,
journalists would have to up their game. And mind you, I pay 0$ right now.

So changing that changes the incentives. If people still mostly want the stuff
they are being fed right now AND are happy paying for that, well ... who are
we to complain.

------
dredmorbius
David Simon's 2008 UC Beerkeley address, "The Audacity of Despair", addresses
the decline of print media beginning in the 1990s.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw](https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw)

------
rconti
Just as importantly, whoever sold the paper to Smith is guilty of the exact
same thing he is. They're both trying to make as much money as possible off a
dying business. And, to be honest, how much can you blame either?

------
notatoad
This is going to be an unpopular opinion here, but does a local Denver paper
really need almost 200 journalists working for it? Reading the average mid-
sized city paper, I'd assume they have about 40-50 reporters.

Considering that I'd never heard anything about the Denver Post prior to all
this discussion about it being harvested by "vulture capitalists", they don't
seem to be doing anything exceptional. If it really takes 184 journalists to
produce a daily newspaper of middling quality, is print journalism worth
saving?

~~~
azemetre
They've won and been nominated for multiple Pulitzer prizes, they aren't
exactly middling quality. That's extremely unfair to label them as such.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prize...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Pulitzer_Prizes)

~~~
repolfx
Of those 9 prizes only two are related to actually reporting news. The rest
are for cartoons or photography. The world is full of people giving away
photos for free, and as for "editorial cartooning", well ... the world is also
full of people being funny for free.

Of the two prizes for news reporting both were for mass shootings that
happened to take place locally. I am skeptical these prizes were awarded based
on some objective evaluation of their reporting skill; the Pulitzer is
probably just awarded on the basis of emotions. Like so much else in
journalism, there are no systems worth a damn.

------
Theodores
The many aspects of newspaper readership decline are very neatly summarised on
Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers)

I grew up delivering newspapers door to door first thing in the morning with
yet more newspaper delivering in the afternoon, after school, this one being
the local paper. I got to be very good at reading all of them and I was a
believer in the product. My papers of choice were the Financial Times and The
Guardian. I started out reading the smaller articles at the foot of the page
and progressed to reading the big articles at the top of the page.

Sometimes a 'child mind' is quite helpful for being objective and seeing
things as they are. I was truly shocked at how low the reading age was for the
tabloid papers - up to and including the Daily Mail. I also found The Times to
be 'faking it', i.e. using big words for the sake of it rather than to convey
meaning. I found The Telegraph to be legit but with Tory viewpoint which was
fine, you didn't have to read the editorial, if you wanted crime stories they
were all there on page 3, the international news was there and the sport, e.g.
cricket was pretty good too.

There were some howevers, for instance I was quite a fan of F1 at the time so
after a race I was reading the reports in all of the papers, I can even
remember the writer names. I didn't want to know about just the winners on the
podium, the fortunes of the back of the grid guys interested me too, yet the
only way I could get a bit of an idea of how they fared was to read all the
papers. I still found this lacking.

Nowadays if I need to know that level of information I can get so much more
and for free, reading blogs and whatnot as well as the BBC overview. There is
no way I would consider reading what the newspapers have to say about F1 even
if I had access to every newspaper for free, even if online rather than in
dead tree format.

There was another 'however' \- as a child delivering papers I did not think
outside of the frame set by the newspapers, so if there was a story on how the
British bid to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia hadn't happened then I would
'believe' that this was bad for jobs and the balance of payments - as if that
mattered. I was not able to think that 'we' (as in the Royal 'we') should not
be selling tanks to the Saudis. The Guardian (never mind the Daily Mail)
didn't let my mind stray as far as questioning whether selling these tanks was
ethical or outside of the founding charter of the United Nations. I was not
given the words to think that.

Back then the wars that happened seemed pretty legit. Even the Falklands
seemed 'fair'. The war in Afghanistan and the Olympic boycotts that followed
all seemed okay.

If we had the internet then then I might have been able to find out that the
Afghanistan war was instigated by America, funding the terrorists and bringing
down a democratically elected government. Much like the F1 situation, the
information was just not obtainable, even if you went out to seek it.

My grandmother did say that you should not believe what they write in the
papers, but the other out there stuff was not there so the default was to
believe what the papers said.

Nowadays, post Iraq, post the Syria fake chemical attacks and with so many
other obvious lies told how is anyone expected to believe the truthiness of
the papers? So as well as the many reasons for newspaper decline given in the
Wikipedia article is a fundamental problem that means no mainstream newspapers
have a core readership of 'fans' \- truth. It is just absent from the
mainstream news. We as a society are no longer on the same page when it comes
to facts.

Online blogs do have the '1000 core fans' needed to give them life, the
mainstream news does not have that. In the UK the printed newspapers are only
read by two groups of people - commuters in tube trains with no WiFi and the
old baby boomer generation.

I learned how the 'old baby boomer generation' read their papers back in the
day of delivering them. They read these things much like how one might eat
lots of 'fiber' in one's diet, because it is allegedly good for you. There
would be sugar coating in the Sunday magazine supplements, so people would
actually be 'licking off the sugar coating' and reading the lifestyle or sport
articles rather than the 'news'. So they weren't really reading papers for
reasons beyond entertainment. This goes on today, it is the same ritual,
something to fill your lazy Sunday afternoon doing. So nobody is reading these
papers and even if they are then their thoughts and opinion on current affairs
matter not. They have been sheeple-ified into believing the five minutes of
hate with no ability to think outside the frame.

A lot of 'young people' who don't touch newspapers with a bargepole are not
illiterate oafs, chances are they have cut the cord with TV and really do not
want to be told what to think anymore. Sadly they get drawn in to fake news
and conspiracy stories thanks to Facebook and what the likes of Cambridge
Analytica do. So we still have not escaped 'the frame'. We have escaped it
enough though for dead-tree newspapers to be as good as dead.

------
Lionsion
> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its
> most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze
> and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation
> of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills
> the product. Wherever newspapers can be found reducing page size, cutting
> news pages, narrowing coverage area, reducing staff, shrinking circulation
> area, postponing the purchase of new equipment and raising subscription
> prices, they are harvesting market position.

Attention anyone sill subscribed to the _St. Paul Pioneer Press_ , the _San
Jose Mercury News_ and the _Orange County Register_ : it's time to quit.

If those papers have any local competitors left, they should get the money
instead.

~~~
ProAm
> By raising prices and lowering quality, a stagnant business can rely on its
> most loyal customers to continue to buy the product, allowing it to squeeze
> and squeeze and squeeze its customers as they croak. This slow liquidation
> of an asset’s value, destroying even its reputation in the process, kills
> the product

I can't help but feel a tiny analogy to Apple with this statement.

~~~
georgeecollins
It is also an analogy for Apple in 1995. Companies harvest their market
position sometimes, and then innovate at other times.

~~~
jessaustin
I think this is a standard technique for fast-food businesses, although I've
never heard it mentioned. Run some flashy ad campaign for low-priced good food
for a few months. Leave the low prices in place for about a year. Then slowly,
slowly ratchet up your prices. After 8-10 years of this, your only remaining
customers have very little price sensitivity, but at some point along the way
you soaked every single customer as hard as you could. If you need to raise
revenue now that you've chased away lots of customers, start over from the
beginning.

I guess someone at Arby's didn't get the "start over" memo...

------
fortythirteen
If you read this article you'll also get to learn how journalism dies -
through opinion pieces promoted as objective reporting.

