Death Throes
The Tribune Company appears to be headed for bankruptcy. Multiple outlets are reporting that the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times has hired bankruptcy consultants and retained law firms noted for their bankruptcy acumen. Things are looking rather bleak for newspapers right now.
Tribune has hired bankruptcy advisers as the ailing newspaper company faces a potential bankruptcy filing, people briefed on the matter said.
The newspaper, which was taken private last year by billionaire investor Samuel Zell, has hired advisers including Lazard and Sidley Austin, one of its longtime law firms, these people said. Tribune has been hobbled by debt related to that sale last year, which has been compounded by the growing drought of advertising for newspapers.
I maintain that part of what is killing these newspaper companies is their slanted, biased and fraudulent reporting. Yes, in a falling economy, ad revenues can be expected to fall. But I suspect that part of the reason they have fallen so hard and so fast is because a lot of people have stopped reading them because they are not playing straight. Is that begging the question? In a way, yes it is. I have no proof of this contention, but it seems to fit the situation.
Advertisers look hard at the demographics before placing ads, especially when times are tough. Many papers have thrown their “objectivity”* completely out the window and have become little more than unpaid shills for a certain political party. That automatically results in a complete loss of readers from the other party. That is demographic doom. If you walk away from half of your potential audience (and revenue producing demographic) you are literally slitting your economic throat.
We’re witnessing the slow, agonizing death throes of an industry that has effectively killed itself.
* Newspapers are seldom really objective, but they used to try a little harder to mask their bias and at least made a show of presenting balanced views or objective reporting. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what has been happening lately.
By feeblemind, December 7, 2008 @ 8:37 pm
It may just be me, but a major reason for the decline of dead tree editions might be the fact that the delivery is so slow. Items one sees online tonight might not appear in print for at least a day, and often longer. Papers are also expensive, clutter up the house, and can be a disposal inconvienience if one is forced to recycle. Papers are 18th century technology. Their time is past.
By daveinboca, December 7, 2008 @ 11:11 pm
The Chicago Tribune and LA Times have been inserting editorializing and slanted bias in their straight news coverage—readers are just not going to sift through this stuff when they have online and other news options available. A lot of other papers are probably going to undergo the same death throes in the near future. Ditto for weekly newsmags which are crib sheets for PC thinking.