Just say F no to any more media outlet consolidations!

[lizkat]

Really this is the last straw. Now Bloomberg thinks to scarf up WaPo or Dow Jones (the parent of Murdoch papers). WTAF.

Bloomberg already charges too much for their online news product. Imagine if they grabbed up WSJ in a moment of Murdoch family indecision on succession plans and infighting amongst the siblings.

As for the WaPo? Man I hope Bezos just emails Mike a drawing of a bird, and I don't mean that blue thing either.

Exclusive: Bloomberg eyes WSJ-parent Dow Jones, WaPo

The combination of Bloomberg and Dow Jones would create an unparalleled business news behemoth.

www.axios.com

 

[lizkat]

Not all the news about news is dreadful. Piece in Nieman Lab about a startup local news operation that means to stay viable while learning on the job in a market that's otherwise full of hedge-fund owned papers.

Newsonomics: Two years after launching a local news company (in an Alden market), here’s what I’ve learned

Eleven takeaways as Lookout Santa Cruz enters its third year.

www.niemanlab.org

 

[lizkat]

On the other hand most of the news about the news biz IS dreadful, and because of consolidations.

Another newspaper printing plant bites the dust. This one is in Rochester, NY.

The latest "local newspaper" metamorphosis into death by a thousand cuts --administered by some parent company owned by a hedge fund that's sometimes owned by a multinational conglomerate-- is not just by cuts to the newsroom staff (which has occurred to the point where one more cut means there is no reporter in some cases) but by closing local printing plants -- thus laying off those workers, usually up to a hundred or so, possibly more-- and printing the papers instead at some centralized printing facility that may be four or five hundred miles away.

What happens in order to continue (or try anyway) to get the paper to the local distribution points in timely fashion is that the hardcopy of the paper is "put to bed" up to eight hours earlier... on the casually proffered grounds that people mostly get their breaking news on a phone or computer anyway, so that hard copy newspapers can "continue" to provide feature articles of interest to local communities. Right. And so those local communities can start providing copy themselves, as amateur reporters, with a "contributed" byline.

There's no shame in the newspaper biz any more. None whatsoever. It's all cost-cutting and asset stripping now, and when the last subscriber hollers uncle because everything in the paper is either off a wire service or made up by their next door neighbor for $35 a column, then the husk of that "news" paper is shunted off to some vulture capital outfit that might be able to flip the lease for the "newsroom" space for a profit, and rent a broom closet for the editor and ad sales rep to work in.

Anyway the 108 printing employees at the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle have just been notified they will be laid off when their jobs are eliminated in April. The paper will be printed 400 miles away in northern New Jersey and trucked to Rochester overnight.

Source (paywalled (but you get a few article views for free):

D&C closing printing facility at Canal Ponds

The Democrat and Chronicle printing plant at Canal Ponds Business Park in Greece is going to be shuttered in April.

www.democratandchronicle.com

This is all a consequence of the newspaper chain owner Gannett having been sold in 2019 as summarized below. Well at least it took almost four years for the new owners to get around to stripping the Rochester paper's assets down to almost nothing. You can currently get a digital-only sub to that paper for 99c per month for "a year" -- if it lasts that long. The sole purpose of such a low promo rate is to jack up the subscriber count for ad revenue purposes. Sigh.... and you get about what you pay for.


Some background (from Wikipedia piece on Gannett)

"On August 5, 2019, New Media Investment Group, parent of GateHouse Media, announced that it would acquire Gannett. New Media Investment Group is managed and controlled by another private equity firm, Fortress Investment Group. Fortress is owned by the Japanese conglomerate Softbank.​

​

Apollo Global Management funded the acquisition with a $1.792 billion loan. The combined company assumed the Gannett name rather than GateHouse name, and Michael E. Reed, the CEO of GateHouse's parent company, was named CEO. The new management team immediately announced it would target "inefficiencies," which could lead to cutbacks at newspapers and reduction in newspaper staff."​

 

[Clix Pix]

This is especially sad because, well, it's in Rochester, NY, home of RIT and NTID.....the latter being the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, an offshoot of Rochester Institute of Technology. Why is this so significant? Because generations of profoundly deaf people have been trained in and become involved in the printing industry because of course the noise of the industrial printers of the old days wasn't an issue for them. Through the years, obviously the process of printing has changed, but even so, I think that quite a few deaf people still have been involved in this field for the entirety of their working lives.

So, yeah, now the 108 printing employees have been or will be given their walking papers -- and I'll bet more than half of them are indeed deaf people, Are they and their families going to be willing and able to move to NJ (if positions were even available there, which doesn't seem to be the case) or to some other location where experienced printing personnel are still valued? What about the other employees, the hearing people? Where are they all going to go?

 

[GermanSuplex]

I’m an NBC/MSNBC fan, and even I don’t like the fact they’re owned by Comcast.

I hate that Sinclair controls so many affiliates. I used to love local news for the no-nonsense reporting and inability to discern an anchor or reporter’s political affiliation, or the affiliation of the broadcast owner.

I hate that independent newspapers are bought by big conglomerates that ruin the local feel and downsize the staff, cut the non-news sections and let the newspaper die. I live in a decent-sized city and our newspaper is a joke.

Social media is for breaking news and for people to opine, it’s not a replacement for good news and journalism. My local paper and news stations were once a source of good, balanced and unbiased news, and my newspaper was more than news, it was a pulse of the city. This does not translate to social media or today’s big company-owned local newspapers (at least where I live).

The most serious issue with Sinclair is that unlike Fox or MSNBC, it’s a lot harder to detect the political bend of news stories when the reporters are your local anchors.

 

[lizkat]

I’m an NBC/MSNBC fan, and even I don’t like the fact they’re owned by Comcast.

I hate that Sinclaire controls so many affiliates. I used to love local news for the no-nonsense reporting and inability to discern an anchor or reporter’s political affiliation, or the affiliation of the broadcast owner.

I hate that independent newspapers are bought by big conglomerates that ruin the local feel and downsize the staff, cut the non-news sections and let the newspaper die. I live in a decent-sized city and our newspaper is a joke.

Social media is for breaking news and for people to opine, it’s not a replacement for good news and journalism. My local paper and news stations were once a source of good, balanced and unbiased news, and my newspaper was more than news, it was a pulse of the city. This does not translate to social media or today’s big company-owned local newspapers (at least where I live).

The most serious issue with Sinclaire is that unlike Fox or MSNBC, it’s a lot harder to detect the political bend of news stories when the reporters are your local anchors.

Yeah Sinclair is known for reducing routine coverage of local politics, and focusing on national level politics with a conservative lean. So what you hear even from the three traditional broadcast news channels sounds like a slightly softer version of Fox and whatever's going on in the city council or the state capitol might get short shrift if mentioned at all... unless the action there is initiated by Dems and then Sinclair tends to show pushback by interviewing local Rs.

Sinclair owns stations in about 40% of the country now, and the effect is to blur editorial and content focus differences in ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox stations in those markets. You turn it on and what you're getting is Sinclair.

 

[GermanSuplex]

Yeah Sinclair is known for reducing routine coverage of local politics, and focusing on national level politics with a conservative lean. So what you hear even from the three traditional broadcast news channels sounds like a slightly softer version of Fox and whatever's going on in the city council or the state capitol might get short shrift if mentioned at all... unless the action there is initiated by Dems and then Sinclair tends to show pushback by interviewing local Rs.

Sinclair owns stations in about 40% of the country now, and the effect is to blur editorial and content focus differences in ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox stations in those markets. You turn it on and what you're getting is Sinclair.

I truly miss the days when you could go a month without catching up the news because the first five or ten minutes of national coverage on the half-hour local news was enough.

Now, as you said, it’s just a more soft and ambiguous version of Fox in many markets.

That’s not to say all of my local news is bad, but I was unaware of the “talking points” they use for the local stations - something that came to light a few years ago. I knew my local company was owned by a conglomerate, but I had no idea they were sneaking their political bend into local broadcasts using the local news anchors. What a bummer.

Naturally, some places’ news coverage will have some sort of perceived bend merely because of the local politics and demographics, but all that is organic. Making your anchors across different affiliates stick to a talking point? Nope, f**** that.

Luckily, social media IS good for local news in my city. I stopped watching the local news by chance right around the time of Sinclair’s meddling made national news. I figure if I’m going to listen to propaganda with my news, I’ll stick to my chosen left or right leaning national networks and being aware of what I’m being fed instead of having it foisted on me surreptitiously by familiar hometown celebs in between local feel-good stories and the weather update.

 

[lizkat]

A huge problem with political reporting today is that pols know the electorate has become hyperpartisan, so they frame all their responses to policy questions in a frameworks of partisan talking points. That only exacerbates the problem of a hyperpartisan electorate... and of course when media ownership gets consolidated, there can be a tendency for the so-called firewall between publisher and editorial side to end up eroded.

Hence the casual reminder at the end of 1600 words about something or other that "so-and-so is the publisher of [this newspaper]." It's up to the reader, if he got that far into the piece, to decide if the c-suite happened to reach into the journo's or editor's choice of adjectives or quotes in that piece or reportage. And of course it's up to readers to notice if some newspaper manages somehow not to notice a piece of news that every other mainstream outlet is reporting on this morning. My own feeling is that these potential conflicts of interest are even worse in televised journalism than in papers.

The other and related problem is "access journalism" where journos end up taking a softball pitch approach to high level pols just so they're thought of first when it comes to planned leaks, floated nominations, breaking news scoops.

At first the journo's part in this might be inadvertent, i.e. maybe running short of time so didn't ask a followup question and a pol's dicey assertion lands with more gravitas than it deserved. But maybe the pol noticed the lack of pushback, or maybe just liked the piece, so he calls on that reporter first after some news conference, and a week later phones that guy up and says "We're not on the record about this but we're thinking to oppose the new skyscraper in midtown if you want to get out ahead of the curve on it.... and check back later with us when we might confirm it."

Yee hah! Reporter gets a juicy tidbit to attribute to "people knowledgeable about the matter" and half the town goes nuts and the whole town buys more papers and the pol gets to find out whether he can actually afford to condemn that skyscraper or should maybe come off as "interested in exploring public opinion" when he finally provides a quote for attribution to him.

Then over time it gets easier to get scoops from that pol... and it gets easier for the pol to plant his point of view or run his idea up the flagpole without taking a direct hit for it if the public doesn't like some proposal.

There's talk now for instance that Punchbowl had become McCarthy's favorite first read of the day, so of course now "everyone" in the Beltway is reading it first too. That outfit was formed by two journos breaking away from Politico a couple years ago. Now Punchbowl has landed in the uncomfortable position (thanks to its competitors) of being scrutinized to see whether "access journalism" will give McCarthy's views something of a free pass as he embarks on leading the GOP side of the House in the 118th Congress.

 

[AG_PhamD]

The decline of local media is very unfortunate. They often do some great reporting.

The MSM/cable news business is a total disaster if you ask me. Rarely do you see articles without some form of political bias- even if totally unrelated to politics, they will find someway to tie it in. Trust is at an all time low. Whether it’s FOX or MSNBC, in my opinion they’re opposite sides of then same coin. I do think there is a place for politics in news coverage, but it cannot be the only or predominant method of coverage. Nor should biased organizations pretend they’re not biased.

Many of these media companies are too reliant on advertising, rather than the previous model of actually readers buying their news. So it’s not surprising to see all the dramatic segments and clickbait articles that people don’t even end up reading past the first paragraph of and an overall effort to instigate negative emotional reactions- in the same way social media had promoted content, which is very much connected.

I hope Bloomberg is not buying up other large media companies, simply for the fact we don’t need more consolidation and corporate influence.

Furthermore, Bloomberg News has a bit of history of kowtowing to China, likely because of their large media presence there, Bloomberg Financial’s business dealings (ie Bloomberg terminals), and Mr. Bloombergs personal financial interests in China. That’s not to say there should be an anti-China bias, the news should be objective, but let’s not pretend the CCP doesn’t often successfully pressure businesses into taking pro- or agnostic views on China. Failure to comply inevitably leads to being shut out of the Chinese market. And I don’t think foreign countries should have influence over large swaths of our media.

 

[lizkat]

The decline of local media is very unfortunate. They often do some great reporting.

They do indeed... e.g., the little Long Island newspaper that questioned some of George Santos' fabrications while the 2022 campaigns were still in progress. But "nobody" read that paper. During campaign season, when political hyperbole is flying everywhere anyway, it's easy enough to rebut low-profile reports like that by just calling the reports clickbait or "planted by political opponents."

It was only after the elections, when first the NYT and then other larger media outlets had started to look into the discrepancies in Santos' real life versus his claims on the campaign trail, that those larger outlets "discovered" that the North Shore Leader (a weekly paper with a circulation of 20k) had actually dissed Santos as a deepfake months earlier. That all started when the paper wanted to endorse a Republican candidate and realized that, uh... "the talented Mr. Santos" was not fit to serve, and eventually endorsed the Democrat in October.

George Santos Story Broke by Local LI Newspaper Months Ago

longislandbusiness.com

In the Washington Post, a piece did note what you mentioned, that local papers often do the legwork and then their reporting gets picked up and relayed to wider audiences. I guess weekly papers don't get that much attention any more. At any rate that reporting about Santos sure flew under the radar for too long.

As for Michael Bloomberg... the Guardian wrote about how he reneged on an initial public statement during his run for the presidency that he would either sell his media company group or put it into a blind trust "or something." Well, no. In the end, he even forbade his businesses' journalists to do any "investigative" stories about his campaign.

Michael Bloomberg demonstrates the dangers of billionaire-owned media | Arwa Mahdawi

The former New York mayor kicked off his presidential run by banning his media company from reporting on him. The super-rich’s grip on the media must be resisted

www.theguardian.com

You know what else just screams democracy? A presidential candidate owning an eponymous and influential news service that has been barred from criticising him. On Sunday, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News sent a memo to the company’s 2,700 journalists telling them they were not to do any investigative stories on Bloomberg’s campaign. While Bloomberg outlets will cover the day-to-day of the presidential contest, they will not be conducting in-depth investigations into their boss. Nor will they investigate his Democratic rivals. They will, however, continue to engage in journalism vis-a-vis Trump’s campaign.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

This wouldn’t be a complete conversation without mentioning it’s all thanks to deregulation by this guy.

 

[lizkat]

This wouldn’t be a complete conversation without mentioning it’s all thanks to deregulation by this guy.


View attachment 20817

Ah, yes. The days when you could win with a smile instead of a snarl. The outcome for governance is somehow never any better for the ordinary American... thanks to the prevalance of lobbyists drafting all the legislation.

We need more education in the USA. Critical thinking. History. The stuff the Rs don't want taught in case people wake up and think for themselves, and the stuff the Ds never manage to appropriate enough money to underwrite specifically (as opposed to getting block grants where the states can practically turn them into slush funds).

Speaking of history: the NYT just ran an essay by a historian that's worth reading. It's about how we're losing the ability to learn from history because we're losing the ability to teach it. And it's about who's disrespecting teaching of history and the humanities now, and it's not just ultra right wing conservatives, it's a possibly inadvertent impact of private sector foundations also deciding to quit funding dissertation grants for historians and graduate students in other areas of the humanities, not least because fewer students are choosing to major in those fields in their undergraduate work.

The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession (NYT opinion piece, paywall lifted)

The humanities, including history, are often considered more an object of ridicule than a legitimate lane of study. Look no further than statements from politicians: Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, assembled a task force in 2012 that recommended that people who major in history and other humanities fields be charged higher tuition at state universities. In 2016, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky said that “French literature majors” should not receive state funding for their degrees. Even more recently, in 2021, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida mocked people who go into debt to “end up with degrees in things like zombie studies.” And it’s not just Republicans: President Barack Obama remarked in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” implying that if a degree didn’t make money it wasn’t worth it. (Mr. Obama later apologized to a University of Texas art historian for his remarks, clarifying that he did believe art history was a valuable subject.)

These material and ideological assaults have engendered a steep decline in undergraduate humanities majors. In the 2018-19 academic year, only 23,923 graduating undergraduates received degrees in history and related fields, which, the A.H.A. notes, is “down more than a third from 2012 and the smallest number awarded since the late 1980s.”

Private groups, which traditionally provided significant financial support to budding humanities scholars, have taken the hint and increasingly stopped supporting the humanities and soft social sciences. The Social Science Research Council recently ended its International Dissertation Research Fellowship program, which in the last 25 years funded over 1,600 scholars exploring “non-U.S. cultures” and “U.S. Indigenous communities,” declaring that the program “accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself.”