◼ As many as 700 -- almost ten-percent of the overall staff -- are on the chopping block at Time Magazine. According to New York Magazine, a whole herd of top-level sacred cows at the New York Times will be given the non-choice of a buyout or a forced layoff within the next few weeks. - John Nolte/Breitbart
And in both cases, it's due to "rapidly declining advertising revenue."
Yeah, that's a shame.
This is what you call going down with the ship. Time and the NYT are Exhibits A and B in the case to expose everything wrong and self-defeating with today's mainstream media. Rather than do the job honestly (which would undoubtedly improve the customer base), and wake up to the reality that the Internet has removed the monopolistic distribution bottleneck on the flow of information that kept them alive for so long, both publications chose instead to double down when it came to pushing a left-wing agenda.
...It's just a fact that if the economy was doing better, advertising revenue would be doing better, and as a result, fewer people at Time and the NYT would be losing their jobs today.
No matter what, though, no matter how bad things get for them personally or for our country as a whole, nothing will ever give these institutions the unselfish moral courage to admit a mistake was made.
◼ Old Media Belatedly Discovers That Elections Have Consequences - Ed Driscoll/PJM
Of course, blaming their layoffs is a dual-edged sword for both Time and the New York Times (especially the New York Times). Fareed Zakaria, the erstwhile Obama advisor who contributes to both Time and CNN, the television network owned by Time-Warner, said in December of 2010 that Americans needed to reduce their consumption...
Well, hey, good news! The American public voted twice for the president these publications openly championed. The economy, influenced by his actions, has slowed dramatically. That economy has forced consumers to consume less. Consuming less means less to manufacture and promote. Which means less advertising, which means less money changing hands with publications. Which means less money for payroll.
Which means less journalists on the payroll.
As the Mencken quote that has continually made the rounds since early 2009 goes, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the common people getting it good and hard also has ramifications for those who believed they were insulated from such suffering....
◼ In a loosely related story: NEWSPAPER OWNERS PLAY HARDBALL WITH UNION: AGREE TO OUR PROPOSED CUTS OR FACE ‘LIQUIDATION’ - Becket Adams/The Blaze
The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News were recently acquired by new owners who apparently have no patience for union contract negotiations: They’ve threatened to “liquidate” both papers if concessions aren’t made.
“In a letter to members of the Newspaper Guild, union president Dan Gross and executive director Bill Ross say that Interstate General Media — which bought the papers last year, along with Philly.com — is seeking $8 million in immediate wage and benefit cuts from the editorial staffs of those papers, even though the guild’s contract runs to October 2013,” Philadelphia Magazine reports....
