In Thursday’s broadcast, George Will almost sound like a conservative columnist. Washington Post.The headline read “How the economy of news changed the news.” Will promoted as newsworthy an article by Andrey Mir, Manhattan Institute. City Journal.
Mir concludes that the demise of newspaper advertising revenue is due to the growth of the internet. Classified advertising fell apart. Google had a much greater ability to target potential customers, and corporate advertisers saw this. In 2000, advertisers gave newspapers $19.6 billion — about a third of papers’ revenue. In 2013, Google’s $51 billion in ad revenues eclipsed American newspapers’ total ad revenues of $23 billion. The revenue generated by classifieds was only $2.2B in 2018.
So their business model shifted to rely on readers rather than advertisers. Mir asserts they went from journalism to “post-journalism,” by which the media elite supply not news but “news validation.” Will summarized:
“Even the strongest American newspapers,” Mir says, “could not hold advertisers: the New York Times began getting more revenue from readers than from ads in 2012.” So, “journalism now sought new partners”: digital subscriptions, the multiplication of which could be driven by anger and fear, the fertilizers of polarization. Editors “agitated the digitized, urban, educated, and progressive youth to the point of political indignation.”
Newspapers’ ad-based business model, appealing to society’s temperate middle, “Observed the journalist’s natural liberal instincts.” The digital subscription business model “elevated the role of progressive discourse producers” — academics and other social-justice warriors — and “empowered activism as a mind-set.”
The trend was already present before Trump but has been exacerbated since then. Mir observes that the younger progressives are the ones who joined social media the most. en masseBut eventually, older, more conservative Americans joined.
The mainstream media had no commodity to offer their new chosen referential audience until that point. Trump made that change. Trump was that missing commodity right away after his win. It was immediately understood by the mainstream media. Trump went from being an amusement character to one of existential threat, and began selling his scares as a new product.
Will avoided the mention of Trump and his newspaper’s pompous motto, even as he more selectively quoted the business model as “donations to a cause.” Mir wrote:
The media quickly learned to solicit subscriptions as support for a noble effort—the protection of democracy from “dying in darkness,” as the Washington Post Put it. It was a new model of business that solicited subscriptions in return for donations.Triggers were required for donations, which Trump’s love-hate alliance with the media provided. Trump was only one of many key players in the new model of business. His supporters were also crucial. The most terrifying thing was that fully half the electorate supported such a “monster” (in the view of the other half).
Mir says that whereas journalism used to want its picture of the world to fit the world, “post-journalism wants the world to fit its picture.” This, he says, “is a definition of propaganda. Post-journalism has turned the media into the crowdfunded Ministries of Truth.”
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