Beacon Street Journal

The Boston Globe recently announced that it was raising the price of its Sunday edition to $5.00, up from $3.50 — a whopping 43% increase. The story is an important one, not just for the financial fortunes of the Globe, but as an indication of what lies in store for a number of mainstream media publications in an age of declining advertising revenues and plummeting circulation.

Yes, the rise of the internet has been a major factor in the decline of the newspaper industry, but there is another reason for its demise, and it has to do with the enormous gulf in values and ideological world-view between those who manage newspapers and the consumers they ostensibly serve. 

A perusal of the May 15, 2009 front pages of both the Times and the Globe illustrates this point with telling effect.

On May 14th, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, and third in line in the presidential succession chain, accused the CIA of deliberately misleading her and the Congress. The story dominated all the Cable TV news outlets as well as the major broadcasters. The following day, the story dominated most newspapers front pages, as well as the political blogs. Yet, given the unprecedented nature of Pelosi’s charges, what was the major news item that adorned the front page of the Boston Globe? “NH set to OK same-sex marriage .” The Globe’s sister publication, the New York Times, in a display of its editorial wisdom, put a story on the proper temperature for heating pot pies on its front page; the Pelosi story was buried on page A20, which the Globe picked-up and ran in its edition for that day.

Boston Globe Publisher Steve Ainsley announced that the price increase for the Sunday Globe will help, “lend us increased financial support to help ensure that we can continue to publish meaningful and original reporting every day.” The question is however, how many of the Globe’s readers share its editors’ view of news prioritization that supplants the Pelosi story with an article on same-sex marriage? Is their May 15th edition an example of what the Globe construes as “meaningful and original reporting?” I doubt whether many readers would share this view. And, therein lies the peril for many mainstream newspapers.

As consumers have discovered, the Globe and many other dailies, long ago stopped publishing the “news”; they instead, proselytize a left-wing political agenda. And, as witnessed by the precipitous decline in circulation, consumers have taken notice.

Writing in Fortune magazine, Melik Kaylan, in an article entitled, How The Media Did Itself In, offers a perspicacious insight into the woes of the newspaper industry, many of which have been self-inflicted and long pre-date the rise of the internet:

Let us begin with the obvious: The public had already turned to alternative sources such as talk radio even before the Internet’s shadow fell on print. In other words, the public voted en masse in favor of “opinions” over hard news before the blogosphere erupted. If people are not now willing to pay for real reporting in print or online, it’s not merely because they get it for free, but because they had already lost faith in what they were fed as “real reporting.”

Will adopting a new business model stem the decline in newspaper circulation and enhance revenues? Not without a radical change in the ideological outlook of newspaper editors. For as Kaylan notes, 

But the country also understands that if traditional news conveyors suddenly revived and re-inflated to maximum size, they would, as before, perpetuate old habits, only with bureaus all over the world, all missing the big story out of political bias or internal politics or hierarchical ossification or some such.

How will news consumers react to the 43% increase in the Sunday Boston Globe? I believe that the increase will only serve to accelerate the paper’s already dwindling circulation numbers. Nor can the circulation problem be addressed by charging for the same content online, for the problem remains the same.

In short, given the ideological predilections of newspaper editors, the erosion of the newspaper industry will continue unabated. Consumers interested in news and tired of the glaring bias and abuse of the gatekeeper function have learned to search elsewhere beyond the pages of newspapers to be informed.