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Andrew S's avatar

This piece acts like newspapers never had arts or lifestyle or real estate or games sections. They always did! The Times bundling those with hard news isn’t exactly a reinvention of the business model.

I agree with the premise that it’s more profitable for Gannett to hire a Taylor Swift reporter than a state government reporter. But that doesn’t mean people — journalists, readers — need to be happy about that fact, or can’t call them out for short-sighted, purely profit maximizing decisions.

What the piece seems to miss is two things behind the frustration: 1) the balance between news vs everything else and 2) the “local” angle. I think it’s perfectly fine for readers and journalists to be upset that there is a greater “fluff” to “news” ratio than there was in the past, because “fluff” is easier to produce nationally and syndicate than local news is, so you need fewer people to do it.

The other thing with fluff is that is less distinctive to a local area - there are dozens of outlets where I could read about Taylor Swift, but probably only a couple of places where I could read about Lansing’s plan for a new city hall. When companies that control those local papers shift their focus away from local stories to make an extra Buck by publishing the same shit I already see everywhere else, it’s natural to feel annoyed and like they could be putting the resources in a different place.

Ultimately the problem is that people see newspapers as a public good, but newspaper company owners don’t. What readers want is a model where the owner isn’t making every decision for pure profit maximization and is willing to take a slightly lower return in exchange for providing a higher quality product (which frankly I think is the NYT model, the paper could probably be “more profitable” if it cut some overseas bureaus, but they maintain them because of their news-focused ethos). And I’m sure there are some other owners in local communities who do think this way - just not Gannett. Not acknowledging this seems like a bit of a blind spot for Nate.

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CJ's avatar

Sometimes I feel like people forget that the value of old school newspapers before the internet had a lot to do with classified ads, the weather report, sports scores, and comics/games. I don't know if the TV guide was a separate subscription, or came bundled, but I remember getting it with the newspaper every Thursday. Pre-internet newspapers had a ton of it's value tied up in non-reporting features that all slowly became much more accessible online.

The success of the NY Times is interesting because it somehow has profited off of a digital bundle of services where most other products tend to be one trick ponies. Places like google and facebook do offer multiple services, but most of them are free.

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