> News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable
Can you talk more about this? I was always under the impression that newspapers and newsrooms were always for-profit enterprises.
Can you talk more about this? I was always under the impression that newspapers and newsrooms were always for-profit enterprises.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrOqjS9ZyA
But trying to do a little research on it, the best I could come up with for proof is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Access_Rule
Still a good show though.