Last summer, Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff predicted Newsweek would be lucky to last five years.
Wolff has changed it – to two years:
[Wolff predicts] Sometime around the fourth quarter of next year, Newsweek will be shuttered (possibly there’s a phase where it goes bi-weekly, or even monthly).”
All this is well and good. But the retrenchment in the traditional liberal media won’t be complete or especially satisfying until NPR’s On the Media goes off the air.
Liberal, biased, and proud of it, the media are driving away half their potential audience. Not the brightest move on their part, but for the later half of the twentieth century they could get away with it since local newspapers were monopolies, and there were very national magazines because of consolidation and the efficiencies of scale in publishing. The mid-20th century saw a huge change in the cost of putting out a paper publication, such that the larger publications had significantly lower publication costs than their competitors. It’s one reason we saw such a consolidation of newspapers and why there are so few multiple newspaper towns anymore.
But what technology giveth them, it now is taking away. The switch from broadcast TV to cable and satellite and the Internet are sapping the traditional monopoly they’ve had on opinion making by adding two components. First, the proliferation of channels is giving more nuanced and targeted entertainment and information to consumers. They’ve removed the ability to have a monopoly on national or even regional news. Secondly, the Internet is also providing an even broader and more interactive medium.
But the biggest threat is that the Internet is more able to target the information consumer more narrowly and at a FAR LOWER COST. Compare what it takes to put out a magazine, the time and effort required to edit, print, and deliver it, with what it takes to put up a web page. There’s a reason Craigslist is essentially free, provides pictures, and far more information, while your classified ad is smaller, has less information, and costs far more.
Sorry, journalists, but your exalted positions are under threat, but this is what happens when monopolies are broken. People find it far easier today to get exactly what they want, not what you feel like delivering. And it’s only going to get worse as even more folks break their newprint and MSM habits.