Towards Better Media ... Not?

Sort of a follow up on this previous post - the following article describes one part the root of the problem with today's MSM/traditional media. That, along with intellectual sloth-driven incompetence on the part of too many news reporters/journalists (yet one more example here), as well as the intellectual sloth-driven need for too many folks to be serviced an opinion instead of forging an informed one for themselves, constitute the whole of the problem - as well as the primary cause for the spreading cancer on the body democratic of our societies.

Here is the article in question:

Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality
By Walter Brasch

Executive management at the Allentown Morning Call recently laid off more than two dozen persons from its newsroom, most of them veteran reporters drawing higher salaries. Management plans to cut 35–40 positions, according to a letter sent by publisher Timothy Johnson. The cuts are about one-fourth of the news staff. The remaining reporters are being told to write more stories under the same deadline constraints. Coverage of local meetings has been put into secondary importance; bureaus have been combined. The Morning Call is not alone.

About 85 percent of all dailies with more than 100,000 circulation, and about half of all dailies with circulations under 100,000, have cut the number of reporters and editors, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. During the first half of this year, newspapers laid off or froze more than 6,500 news positions. This was the biggest loss in three decades, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

With the layoffs, news quality has suffered. A newsroom filled with younger reporters—they aren’t paid as much as the senior reporters who were terminated or laid off—leaves a newspaper vulnerable to a newsroom with less knowledge of the community and how to gather, report, and write news. Almost no newspapers have proofreaders. About 40 percent of all newspapers report they have fewer copyeditors today than just two years ago. No proofreaders means more typos. Fewer copyeditors means sloppier copy, more factual error, and a lot more stories that are incomplete.

During the past few years, newspaper owners demanded and were getting at 20–40 percent profit, among the highest for any industry—and that includes Big Oil. With newsrooms and the news product already lean, the owners kept taking and taking.

And now there’s an economic recession. Subscribers are questioning their annual $150–250 investments. Businesses are folding, and the ones remaining are reducing newspaper advertising budgets.


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