By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
I take absolutely NO pleasure in people losing their jobs, Save Jerseyans, unless they’re public officials/employees who aren’t earning their tax dollar-financed paychecks. Jim Moran and I are just going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
With that being said, I’m still admittedly amazed (though not totally surprised) at some of the media establishment members’ reactions over the past 24 hours following the sobering announcement that 40 of 156 Newark Star-Ledger newsroom employees have been laid off.
What I’m hearing and reading are lamentations over the alleged implications of these cuts for state house/Trenton/government coverage given that the Ledger remains New Jersey’s largest albeit humbled daily paper.
It’s analogous to what we hear every time someone proposes cutting funding for a wasteful or redundant government program; little or no attention is given to the underlying reason for the cuts, but plenty of emotional appeals are offered in defense of what the targeted entity’s core function should be for the community (regardless of whether that core function is being achieved).
None of the talking heads are entertaining the notion that MAYBE, just maybe, the cuts are the result of the Ledger failing to perform its core function? Successful businesses immediately look at their product and its marketing strategy when sales dip. Why school districts, government agencies and yes, newspapers, think they’re special is beyond me.
Some suggestions: most print dailies are increasingly lite on so-called “hard news” (e.g. dispassionate analysis of the collapse of our state pension system) and heavy on “soft news” (e.g. Warren County family rescues pit bull from black bear). What precious little hard news we DO get is in the form of an opinion and unapologetically slants to the Left. And when I’m talking about bias, I’m not even obsessing over policy per se.
Consider how much time, ink and attention is devoted to an isolated traffic jam in Northern New Jersey, but when the President of the United States marinates in scandals – without holding any press conferences to explain himself – the media dutifully take it on the chin without so much as a peep!
Local politics (which I’m defining here as anything below the federal and statewide officeholder levels) are afforded virtually no attention whatsoever. And what happens at town hall is arguably more important than what’s transpiring in the Oval Office, at least in terms of most taxpayers’ daily quality of life.
So sure, there’s a simple reason why websites like Save Jersey, MoreMonmouthMusings and NJSpotlight are growing by leaps and bounds despite very modest or nonexistent advertising budgets or investor capital: we’re providing products (see above) that people want but the mainstream print dailies refuse to provide.
It’s free market capitalism 101, folks, possibly explaining why so many newsroom types are mystified by what’s happening to them.
I’ll dumb it down: this decline isn’t 100% attributable to the Internet. News consumers are voting with their wallets by cancelling their subscriptions. They’re sick of newspapers that under-serve and over-politicize. The numbers tell all tales. The Star-Ledger’s print circulation averages 167,600 (Mon through Say) and 265,500 on Sunday; that’s down from 316,280 and 455,699, respectively, in 2009.
A HUGE drop. In only five years.
NJ.com (the online version headed up by a separate editorial entity under the same corporate umbrella) is reportedly performing much stronger and they’ve got some solid political coverage (h/t Matt Friedman), but as is this case across the news industry, advances in monetizing online news consumption are being outstripped by the collapse of print readership.
Print partisans will undoubtedly cite market research for the proposition that many modern Americans WANT soft news. One of the media’s least favorite institutions provides a great example of how giving consumers what they say they want isn’t always the best marketing strategy. The Vatican II Council relied on similar logic when they upended the Catholic mass in the 1960s. The goal was to re-energize the Church faithful, but up until the recent ascension of Pope Francis, mass attendance has been on a steady slide for the past half of a century.
It’s a strategy that reinforces decline rather than combat it.
Time is running out, Save Jerseyans. The Ledger won’t recover, nor will the industry generally, until they are willing to come to grips with their products’ deficiencies. I actually appreciate the media’s exalted opinion of the “Fourth-Estate” and its traditional role in playing the watchdog of American democracy and educating the voting public.
Here’s an idea: stop talking about it and starting DOING it again!
>> I take absolutely NO pleasure in people losing their jobs. <<
I take umbrage with this statement. There are at least a couple of hundred people in D.C. whom I (and, I presume, you as well) would take an enormous pleasure in losing their jobs. Starting with Kamrad Obamov, of course.
As for the Ledger, maybe they would be more successful if they occasionally wrote for the other half of the state population. You know, those pesky conservatives bitterly clinging to their guns and their Bibles… But not to worry, a bailout is coming as soon as Gov. Christie leaves the office – in fact, probably even sooner.
I do hope it was the reporter who deleted every comment I made on his articles!
The Ledger has beaten Christie into the ground on “bridgegate”. However, when Cory Booker and other Essex County Democrats are caught with their hand in the till, the story is spiked after one printing. The beauty of the free enterprise system is that gross stupidity is allowed to fail. The Ledger is failing. It is getting what it deserves.
Closing a bridge is 5 yr old behavior. Our presidency has a built in structure of quasi worship which amounts to a constitutional flaw. And over eating and anger is no recipe