Why it’s bad to bullshit reporters, volume eight:
Documents reveal double-digit profit margins at scores of newspapers on verge of massive layoffs
even as bad times engulfed the industry. But I’ve never seen actual
numbers until now, because Corporate keeps the performance of
individual businesses a well-guarded secret.
It has gotten to the point where Mr. A takes away the sharp objects at the table when someone brings up “the terrible times facing newspapers these days” or “isn’t it just awful how no one reads anymore.” Newspapers make plenty of money. PLENTY of money. They are wildly successful businesses. If you or I owned them we’d be jumping for joy.
They just don’t make enough money to satisfy the greedy, rapacious assholes who own and run them. This isn’t a death, you know. It’s a homicide. Newspapers aren’t dying. They’re being murdered. And until somebody convenes an academic conference on how to overthrow these fuckers and raise funds for employee buyouts of every last one of these newspapers you cannot pay me in solid gold ingots to listen to one more stupid lecture about the Internet.
Deborah Howell the other day waswanking on and on about what the newsroom needed to do to fix the horrible horrible problems facing the industry, as if writing a 12-inch story instead of a 15-inch story is gonna make readers suddenly pick you up, as if marketing and distribution have nothing to do with this, as if it matters what’s in the paper if you don’t know about it or can’t find it.
It’s maddening because there’s so little journalists can do about this shit, when it’s all being run by people who come down and lecture you that you’re not covering the right stuff. Write more about pets, or flip-flops, or Sex and the City. Let people send in their teenage kids’ poetry. As if that shit even counts when there’s money like this being squandered.
Schmucks.
A.