The NY Times wants a taxpayer funded bailout to prop up its fake news operations
04/05/2020 / By JD Heyes
There’s a word used by many people living in the Northeast to describe the unmitigated gall surrounding a plea from editors and executives at The New York Times: Chutzpah.
As noted by John Nolte at Breitbart News, it seems that coronavirus-related business slowdowns and changes in online advertiser algorithms (and maybe a healthy dose of karma) are putting a serious dent in the Times’ revenue.
As such, the paper has begun laying off staff and cutting salaries — while daring to demand a taxpayer-funded bailout that would have to be signed by a president the paper has been trying to help depose since he took office.
First, a little background.
On Monday, it was reported that the Tampa Bay Times would be cutting print coverage effectively immediately due a dramatic fall-off in revenues to just two days per week, Sunday and Wednesday.
“The company reported a surge in traffic to its website … and growth in digital subscriptions over the last few weeks” but “the pandemic sent advertising sales into a plunge. In just the last two weeks, [advertising] cancellations have cost us more than $1 million, and there is no sign of quick recovery on the horizon. We must act now,” the paper noted.
Coronavirus-related slowdowns are also occurring elsewhere in the media industry. Gannett, one of the country’s largest newspaper conglomerates, which publishes titles like USA Today, the Des Moines Register, and the Arizona Republic, also announced it would be cutting staff as well.
According to a memo from Gannett CEO Paul Bascobert, the company is asking employees to make a “collective sacrifice…as soon as this week.”
“Our plan is to minimize long-term damage to the business by implementing a combination of furloughs and pay reductions,” the memo continues. (Related: Facebook to push more left-wing FAKE NEWS by “flagging” real news as fake.)
Poynter reports that this action is being taken in response to “big advertising declines.”
‘Let’s transition into a national statist news conglomerate much on the model of Chinese propaganda media’
Other newspapers are following suit, including Chicago’s Daily Herald, which is reducing newsroom pay by 15 percent and salaries at the parent company by 20 percent.
None of this is due to a lack of clicks, Nolte points out. Rather, it has much more to do with how Left-wing groups like Media Matters and Sleeping Giants have so altered the traditional online ad-buying dynamic to hurt conservative publishers that they created a beast which is now destroying their precious Left-wing publishers too. Read about it here (the latter half of the article).
Which brings us back to the NY Times and their ‘solution’ to this problem of low ad revenues at a time of higher viewership (that they helped create): Have newspapers transition from a for-profit model to being supported by sugar daddy donors:
The time is now to make a painful but necessary shift: Abandon most for-profit local newspapers, whose business model no longer works, and move as fast as possible to a national network of nimble new online newsrooms. That way, we can rescue the only thing worth saving about America’s gutted, largely mismanaged local newspaper companies — the journalists.
Translation: ‘Let’s transition into a national statist news conglomerate much on the model of Chinese propaganda media.’ And for good measure, since this ‘nimble new’ network is supported by sycophantic donors, there will be zero market pressure on it to be fair, balanced, or factual.
If a news organization has no need to cater to truthfulness and honesty in order to attract and retain readers, then how bad do you think the fake news and lying will get?
Think of the Washington Post as a singular national ‘network’ owned/supported by billionaires like Jeff Bezos: There would never be any negative, factual coverage of Amazon.
The Times is suffering now under the weight of a situation it helped to create. Karma is a you-know-what.
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Tagged Under: accountability, ad revenue, coronavirus, deception, donor support, fake news, honesty, journalists, lies, nationalize, news cartels, non-profit, NY Times, private news, propaganda, The New York Times
