Sep 14, 2023·edited Sep 14, 2023Liked by Nate Silver
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.
Bundling fun light news with hard news is not new for major cultural city papers like NYT or LAT, but most local papers didn’t do it much. Most local rags survived on pre-internet advertising for homes, cars, and random classifieds. I recall a whole insert (not a couple pages) showing the nicest used cars in LA County.
High quality for profit newsrooms to cover city hall is just not coming back. (I don’t have share Silver’s ray of hope that Gannett might reinvest the Tay revenue bump.) If the community isn’t large or generous enough to fund a non-profit team, I expect some Substackers to launch part time local news projects. Someone who is already a nerd about local news and writes well would be a huge asset. The editor is missing from the equation, but it’s a lot better than no coverage.
Smaller papers definitely had cultural sections too - remember the fuss over the Olive Garden review in Grand Forks, ND?
Anyways to be clear my suggestion is a hybrid between for-profit and non-profit newsrooms — call them “low profit” newsrooms. You just need some civically minded owner who is willing to take the paper private and is happy with a 15% margin instead of a 20% margin. The same way that spending lots of money on players while running a sports team isn’t purely “profit maximizing” but owners do it for other reasons.
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.
It makes sense imho that after 7 years of non stop coverage of either we will all die or our democracy will die ...people feel like it is ok to smile on occasion and that’s likely a good thing.
Yeah imagine if the shaman guy had stayed another half hour in the Senate chamber. It would have overthrown democracy because *mumble mumble* REASONS.
Meanwhile people you agree with did the same thing this week, trespassing in the Capitol and occupying Congressional leaders' offices, but you don't care about that because your entire worldview is the purest friend-enemy distinction imaginable.
The only current major threat to American democracy is the ongoing attempts by the existing regime to have their main political opponent arrested and jailed. This is extremely common in authoritarian states around the world—but again, you approve of it now because you have literally no principles except the friend-enemy distinction.
It is common to prosecute your political opponents in authoritarian states, but it's hardly rare in Democracies either. If I recall correctly, nearly every S Korean president in the last thirty years has had corruption charges brought against them and Nicholas Sarkozy is facing a ten year stint in a French prison if he's convicted for campaign finance law violations. We've also had many congressmembers in the US government go to jail, even in just the past two decades, from both parties (Anthony Weiner, Dennis Hastert, Rick Renzi, Jesse Jackson Jr, and those are just the big names). People who commit crimes should be held accountable, controversial opinion, I know
A few years back, the Times published an fascinating, disturbing piece on how an organization of military contractors in the US had mass murdered civilians in the Middle East by ordering drone strikes on non-military targets. There was a huge coverup involved, both literal (they went in the next day to hide civilian corpses) and metaphorical (the guilty parties went unpunished, and the whistleblower who alerted the Times was retaliated against).
It was the kind of story war journalists make their careers researching and writing, and it barely registered as a blip on the American public consciousness. The twitter conversation on it was mostly limited to a small subset of people who care about US military ethics or the conflict in the Middle East, while the vast majority of NYT readers and subscribers never interacted with it at all. 50 years ago, it would have been an above the fold, front page headline and the leading segment on the evening news block, but both print and video news media orgs have figured out that the average American news consumer just doesn't care that much about war crimes or other serious things going on halfway around the world.
It’s ironic that Nate titles this piece as a “Taylor Swift” story with a prominent photo of Taylor at the top rather than what it is which is a piece about the downfall of hard, and local, journalism. He, too, is using the allure of Swift to bring in a much larger audience that he would have if he titled the piece more directly about the topic. :-)
I suppose only Nate knows if it's apropos based on his intension in making that choice. It's certainly ironic that the article is "committing the sin" that the article is lamenting.
I seriously considered becoming a paid subscriber after your post about your political views, todays post eliminated lingering hesitation#. I’m not well-informed enough to pass judgement on content, but I like your style and attitude. Looking forward to reading more. Thanks.
If you want to be fair, the "most popular" section is actually a little different, and notably more news-focused, so the basic point about what's driving clicks (and presumably ad revenue), might be slightly overstated.
That said "most popular" is a black box that might or might not be the same as "most read." It might be an interesting and important distinction, though, since the subtext of this is certainly that most people are getting a lot of news from social media in one form or another, so what people are sharing is definitely relevant.
More broadly, of course, a ton of the decline in local reporting can be directly traced to ad revenue flowing to online ads (and dating sites--like Nate, I'm just old enough to remember when local classified ads and personal ads were a thing, and a major source of newspaper revenue) which are appealing to advertisers because of the micro targeting and metrics, and we are probably never going to be able to walk that back as a society. This is, arguably, a failure of capitalism to produce what most consumers would probably like if they could choose, but as other commenters have noted, producing a different outcome would probably involve somehow making news a public/private enterprise or otherwise creating regulation that seems unlikely in this political situation (and would no doubt create all sorts of other unintended consequences).
Despite the nit-picking, this is just the sort of hot take I rely on Nate for and why I've followed him here!
Boy, the US/UK cultural gulf never feels wider than the top story on the NYT being about someone I’ve never heard of. :) But congrats to her anyway…
I partly agree with the point being made here. But as another commenter said, the risk is always that the newspaper decides that ‘hard news’ just isn’t worth what the effort, and since the celebrity reporting is way more profitable, to max out on that instead. I’m not saying the NYT will do that, but plenty of media without such deep pockets (and with less of a reputation to preserve) have done so.
This is very close if not identical to avoiding (or contributing to?) the death spiral in cost accounting. It makes me wonder if the average critic realizes that news orgs are money making endeavors.
Fair, but also the vibe newspaper owners give off is that every paper has suddenly become unprofitable, when in fact they remain profitable, just not quite as profitable as they were 20 years ago.
This might be true, but they are profitable only because of the consolidation and the cutting of local beat reporters, whose salary used to be paid by classified ads and local advertising money (and national) that now mostly goes to Facebook and Google.
Is that actually the case? I haven’t looked at Gannett’s financials in a while but recall that all the cuts were designed to attempt to maintain prior of profitability not “this is the only thing that can keep us afloat.”
And the continued existence of independent / smaller newspaper chains suggests you can succeed without consolidation with the right ownership mentality. Unfortunately for Gannett - and I don’t blame them, they’re a publicly traded company - they need to fixate on each dollar. That’s just a bad model in this industry (as in many others). Privately held companies that don’t need to just think about the next quarter can make better decisions.
Yah, I agree with this. I wasn't really comparing Gannett now to then, though--rather thinking back of my childhood (1980s) when my college town of about 12k people and the next town over of 20k sustained two newspapers (I think a daily and a weekly), each with local reporters, plus an ad staff and--I'm pretty sure--a full print shop to do actual physical paste-ups and lay type (I'm not sure if the tech exactly but I definitely toured the printer once). This was before digital pre-press, so we are talking about a ton of work in that department.
They also each had an ad staff and took in a ton of money from local businesses buying ads, and I could reliably find a review of my children's chorus and profiles of local high school students. They already ran stuff by the AP and stuff, but had mostly locally written op-eds and such, and even though the town was pretty polarized for the time (being half logging/fishing money and half university community), everyone subscribed to the paper and many of my friends had their first jobs delivering papers.
The advent of the internet and changes in print tech absolutely made consolidation make a lot of economic sense (before that, a consolidator would have had to physically ship papers or keep a local printer employed and send info by fax or phone), but the economics of keeping local reporters on staff meant there was a basic trust level in the newspaper, and the decline in that is for sure a driver in the polarization of news.
That trip down memory lane got a little off topic, but it wasn't totally disrupted until the early aughts at least I think, so it's not ancient history.
Next step is a full-on interrogation of how the quarterly pressure on publicly traded companies lead to all sorts of societally sub-optimal outcomes...but that, like my screed above, is pretty well-trod territory, and I still will accept Nate's basic premise that anything that makes the news business more profitable (at least if it isn't rage clicks on FB fights) is probably good for News.
“I still will accept Nate's basic premise that anything that makes the news business more profitable (at least if it isn't rage clicks on FB fights) is probably good for News.”
I mostly agree with this assuming they reinvest at least some of the excess profits in the business. If they just get handed out to shareholders much less so.
In growing cities newspapers generally had a very valuable plot of land that could be sold for a lot of money. The Miami Herald was sitting on land worth over a billion dollars but they sold it for a mere $236 million to fund their move away from the land to a new HQ.
Did anyone notice that the NYT Top Ten Most Popular Articles list for that day looked like the table of contents for a Glamour magazine edition? Has the NYT become the chick news, and the WSJ the guy news?
I would like to donate to an organization that is exclusively focused on muckraking. I don’t even need the work product to be polished articles, and would be happy with no perks for donation. Ideally the output would be a publicly available, well-indexed archive of primary source material. Any good options for me?
Taylor Swift is an *industry* and an important one at that for the town.
You're talking about roadies, musicians, sound people, crew, all the things that makes it go. People who don't work for Swift want to know her impact. If they do it right, it won't only be fan service, but actual news
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.
Bundling fun light news with hard news is not new for major cultural city papers like NYT or LAT, but most local papers didn’t do it much. Most local rags survived on pre-internet advertising for homes, cars, and random classifieds. I recall a whole insert (not a couple pages) showing the nicest used cars in LA County.
High quality for profit newsrooms to cover city hall is just not coming back. (I don’t have share Silver’s ray of hope that Gannett might reinvest the Tay revenue bump.) If the community isn’t large or generous enough to fund a non-profit team, I expect some Substackers to launch part time local news projects. Someone who is already a nerd about local news and writes well would be a huge asset. The editor is missing from the equation, but it’s a lot better than no coverage.
Smaller papers definitely had cultural sections too - remember the fuss over the Olive Garden review in Grand Forks, ND?
Anyways to be clear my suggestion is a hybrid between for-profit and non-profit newsrooms — call them “low profit” newsrooms. You just need some civically minded owner who is willing to take the paper private and is happy with a 15% margin instead of a 20% margin. The same way that spending lots of money on players while running a sports team isn’t purely “profit maximizing” but owners do it for other reasons.
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.
I know a guy that worked at a major newspaper around the turn of the century…his one word to describe the management was “hubris”.
It makes sense imho that after 7 years of non stop coverage of either we will all die or our democracy will die ...people feel like it is ok to smile on occasion and that’s likely a good thing.
Especially since in that time neither we nor “muh democracy” has actually died.
Democracy came damn close to it and remains under distressingly real threat, and there remain plenty of threats to our lives as well.
Yeah imagine if the shaman guy had stayed another half hour in the Senate chamber. It would have overthrown democracy because *mumble mumble* REASONS.
Meanwhile people you agree with did the same thing this week, trespassing in the Capitol and occupying Congressional leaders' offices, but you don't care about that because your entire worldview is the purest friend-enemy distinction imaginable.
The only current major threat to American democracy is the ongoing attempts by the existing regime to have their main political opponent arrested and jailed. This is extremely common in authoritarian states around the world—but again, you approve of it now because you have literally no principles except the friend-enemy distinction.
It is common to prosecute your political opponents in authoritarian states, but it's hardly rare in Democracies either. If I recall correctly, nearly every S Korean president in the last thirty years has had corruption charges brought against them and Nicholas Sarkozy is facing a ten year stint in a French prison if he's convicted for campaign finance law violations. We've also had many congressmembers in the US government go to jail, even in just the past two decades, from both parties (Anthony Weiner, Dennis Hastert, Rick Renzi, Jesse Jackson Jr, and those are just the big names). People who commit crimes should be held accountable, controversial opinion, I know
A few years back, the Times published an fascinating, disturbing piece on how an organization of military contractors in the US had mass murdered civilians in the Middle East by ordering drone strikes on non-military targets. There was a huge coverup involved, both literal (they went in the next day to hide civilian corpses) and metaphorical (the guilty parties went unpunished, and the whistleblower who alerted the Times was retaliated against).
It was the kind of story war journalists make their careers researching and writing, and it barely registered as a blip on the American public consciousness. The twitter conversation on it was mostly limited to a small subset of people who care about US military ethics or the conflict in the Middle East, while the vast majority of NYT readers and subscribers never interacted with it at all. 50 years ago, it would have been an above the fold, front page headline and the leading segment on the evening news block, but both print and video news media orgs have figured out that the average American news consumer just doesn't care that much about war crimes or other serious things going on halfway around the world.
It’s ironic that Nate titles this piece as a “Taylor Swift” story with a prominent photo of Taylor at the top rather than what it is which is a piece about the downfall of hard, and local, journalism. He, too, is using the allure of Swift to bring in a much larger audience that he would have if he titled the piece more directly about the topic. :-)
Is it really irony, or is it just perfectly apropos?
I suppose only Nate knows if it's apropos based on his intension in making that choice. It's certainly ironic that the article is "committing the sin" that the article is lamenting.
I seriously considered becoming a paid subscriber after your post about your political views, todays post eliminated lingering hesitation#. I’m not well-informed enough to pass judgement on content, but I like your style and attitude. Looking forward to reading more. Thanks.
What do you think of the new Slowdive album?
Not Nate Silver, but here's a not very hot take: it's good!
If you want to be fair, the "most popular" section is actually a little different, and notably more news-focused, so the basic point about what's driving clicks (and presumably ad revenue), might be slightly overstated.
That said "most popular" is a black box that might or might not be the same as "most read." It might be an interesting and important distinction, though, since the subtext of this is certainly that most people are getting a lot of news from social media in one form or another, so what people are sharing is definitely relevant.
More broadly, of course, a ton of the decline in local reporting can be directly traced to ad revenue flowing to online ads (and dating sites--like Nate, I'm just old enough to remember when local classified ads and personal ads were a thing, and a major source of newspaper revenue) which are appealing to advertisers because of the micro targeting and metrics, and we are probably never going to be able to walk that back as a society. This is, arguably, a failure of capitalism to produce what most consumers would probably like if they could choose, but as other commenters have noted, producing a different outcome would probably involve somehow making news a public/private enterprise or otherwise creating regulation that seems unlikely in this political situation (and would no doubt create all sorts of other unintended consequences).
Despite the nit-picking, this is just the sort of hot take I rely on Nate for and why I've followed him here!
Also interesting: the desire for a Swift reporter rather than a pop reporter is a sign of how denuded the pop talent scene is of late.
Boy, the US/UK cultural gulf never feels wider than the top story on the NYT being about someone I’ve never heard of. :) But congrats to her anyway…
I partly agree with the point being made here. But as another commenter said, the risk is always that the newspaper decides that ‘hard news’ just isn’t worth what the effort, and since the celebrity reporting is way more profitable, to max out on that instead. I’m not saying the NYT will do that, but plenty of media without such deep pockets (and with less of a reputation to preserve) have done so.
I'm a yank and I've never heard of Robin Roberts either.
This is very close if not identical to avoiding (or contributing to?) the death spiral in cost accounting. It makes me wonder if the average critic realizes that news orgs are money making endeavors.
Fair, but also the vibe newspaper owners give off is that every paper has suddenly become unprofitable, when in fact they remain profitable, just not quite as profitable as they were 20 years ago.
This might be true, but they are profitable only because of the consolidation and the cutting of local beat reporters, whose salary used to be paid by classified ads and local advertising money (and national) that now mostly goes to Facebook and Google.
Is that actually the case? I haven’t looked at Gannett’s financials in a while but recall that all the cuts were designed to attempt to maintain prior of profitability not “this is the only thing that can keep us afloat.”
And the continued existence of independent / smaller newspaper chains suggests you can succeed without consolidation with the right ownership mentality. Unfortunately for Gannett - and I don’t blame them, they’re a publicly traded company - they need to fixate on each dollar. That’s just a bad model in this industry (as in many others). Privately held companies that don’t need to just think about the next quarter can make better decisions.
Yah, I agree with this. I wasn't really comparing Gannett now to then, though--rather thinking back of my childhood (1980s) when my college town of about 12k people and the next town over of 20k sustained two newspapers (I think a daily and a weekly), each with local reporters, plus an ad staff and--I'm pretty sure--a full print shop to do actual physical paste-ups and lay type (I'm not sure if the tech exactly but I definitely toured the printer once). This was before digital pre-press, so we are talking about a ton of work in that department.
They also each had an ad staff and took in a ton of money from local businesses buying ads, and I could reliably find a review of my children's chorus and profiles of local high school students. They already ran stuff by the AP and stuff, but had mostly locally written op-eds and such, and even though the town was pretty polarized for the time (being half logging/fishing money and half university community), everyone subscribed to the paper and many of my friends had their first jobs delivering papers.
The advent of the internet and changes in print tech absolutely made consolidation make a lot of economic sense (before that, a consolidator would have had to physically ship papers or keep a local printer employed and send info by fax or phone), but the economics of keeping local reporters on staff meant there was a basic trust level in the newspaper, and the decline in that is for sure a driver in the polarization of news.
That trip down memory lane got a little off topic, but it wasn't totally disrupted until the early aughts at least I think, so it's not ancient history.
Next step is a full-on interrogation of how the quarterly pressure on publicly traded companies lead to all sorts of societally sub-optimal outcomes...but that, like my screed above, is pretty well-trod territory, and I still will accept Nate's basic premise that anything that makes the news business more profitable (at least if it isn't rage clicks on FB fights) is probably good for News.
“I still will accept Nate's basic premise that anything that makes the news business more profitable (at least if it isn't rage clicks on FB fights) is probably good for News.”
I mostly agree with this assuming they reinvest at least some of the excess profits in the business. If they just get handed out to shareholders much less so.
Anyways, this is a great take overall.
In growing cities newspapers generally had a very valuable plot of land that could be sold for a lot of money. The Miami Herald was sitting on land worth over a billion dollars but they sold it for a mere $236 million to fund their move away from the land to a new HQ.
Nate Silver is sad and listens to Loveless every night
Did anyone notice that the NYT Top Ten Most Popular Articles list for that day looked like the table of contents for a Glamour magazine edition? Has the NYT become the chick news, and the WSJ the guy news?
I would like to donate to an organization that is exclusively focused on muckraking. I don’t even need the work product to be polished articles, and would be happy with no perks for donation. Ideally the output would be a publicly available, well-indexed archive of primary source material. Any good options for me?
Taylor Swift is an *industry* and an important one at that for the town.
You're talking about roadies, musicians, sound people, crew, all the things that makes it go. People who don't work for Swift want to know her impact. If they do it right, it won't only be fan service, but actual news
Nate: Thanks for this. Refreshing to read something well thought out, articulately phrased and tied to reality