By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
The Boston Courant, famous (or infamous) for its refusal to publish content online, is going out of business—and, weirdly enough, its anti-web stance is the reason (but not in the way you might think). Adam Gaffin explains.
We talked about the reasons for the Courant‘s apparent success last September on Beat the Press (above).
Media observer Michael Wolff writes in USA Today about the difficulties facing any news organization that seeks to make all or most of its money from digital advertising. His example is The Guardian, a left-leaning British newspaper to which he and I both used to contribute.
The Guardian is proudly, aggressively digital. Its print edition is little more than a vestigial limb (especially outside the UK), and its executives refuse to implement a paywall. The result, Wolff says, is that the trust set up to run The Guardian in perpetuity is running out of money. As I wrote last week for WGBHNews.org, relying on digital advertising is a dubious proposition because its very ubiquity is destroying its value. Wolff puts it this way:
The reality is that the Guardian’s future is almost entirely dependent on advertising revenue in a medium where the price of a view heads inexorably to an increment hardly above zero. But the hope remains that, in ways yet to be imagined, some innovation will make large profits suddenly possible.
Digital paywalls are helping to bolster the bottom line at papers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe—but they are hardly a solution to the larger problems the newspaper business faces. Print advertising still brings in most of the revenue, but it’s on the wane.
Last week I visited The Philadelphia Inquirer, a major metro similar to the Globe that was recently donated to a nonprofit foundation. It’s a promising ownership model. The Inquirer still needs to break even, which is no sure thing. But local control, no pressure to meet the expectations of shareholders, and the possibility of some grant money being raised to pay for reporting projects may bring stability to the Inquirer after years of chaos. (The nonprofit New Haven Independent was the main focus of my 2013 book, The Wired City.)
One thing they’re not talking about at the Inquirer is free digital, even though the Inquirer and its sister paper, the tabloid Daily News, compete with a vibrant (though small) free digital-only project called Billy Penn, whose modest budget is paid primarily by sponsoring events. Though I remain skeptical about paywalls for reasons I laid out in my WGBH piece, the one thing I’m certain of is that the money has to come from somewhere.
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
For the next week you’re going to be inundated with prognostications about what the results of the Iowa caucuses mean for New Hampshire and beyond. We’ve all been wrong about so many things that I’m not sure why anyone should pay attention. So tonight let’s pause for a moment and consider what has actually happened.
As I write this, Ted Cruz has won the Republican caucuses, beating Donald Trump. Marco Rubio is running third, which was expected, but turned in such a strong performance that he may yet slip ahead of Trump, which wasn’t expected. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is leading Bernie Sanders by the slimmest of margins, and it’s possible that we won’t know who actually won until sometime Tuesday.
On the surface, Trump’s bad night may suggest a victory for sanity. But consider: Cruz, Trump, and Ben Carson together received some 61 percent of the votes. And all three of them are extremists who share similar anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim views. In fact, Cruz and Carson are considerably to the right of Trump, who subscribes to no ideology beyond what’s advantageous to him at any given moment.
By winning an impressive 23 percent (as of this moment), Rubio has finally emerged as the establishment Republican alternative after months of failing to pick up the baton. Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and the rest can go home now. But are the kinds of people who support Cruz, Trump, and Carson really going to turn around and vote for the establishment choice?
Maybe they will. Rubio, after all, was elected to the Senate with Tea Party support in 2010, and during this campaign he has moved far to the right on immigration. His pandering on religion excludes anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his particular brand of Christianity—never mind that he himself has been a Catholic, a Mormon, and an evangelical. If the way to defeat extremism is to offer extremism lite, then Rubio may be the Republicans’ best bet. But I suspect he’d be easy pickings for the Democrats if they weren’t so battered and bruised themselves.
I’m not sure how impressed I’m supposed to be by Sanders’s near-win over Clinton. Other than New Hampshire, Iowa was always going to be his best state. I’m inclined to think that any victory by Clinton, no matter how slim, should be seen as a victory. Sanders is still likely to take New Hampshire next week, but that’s already been baked into everyone’s expectations. Her advantages for winning the nomination remain enormous.
But now we get into the media-expectations game. And Clinton is going to get hammered over the next week because she didn’t win Iowa by a wide enough margin, even though there were plenty of reasons to believe she wouldn’t win at all.
You could see the consensus emerging tonight on cable news: There were two winners—Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders—and one big loser—Trump. Cruz was getting very little credit for his victory. And Clinton was portrayed as barely hanging on by her fingernails. Thursday’s debate looms large.
I don’t know how much it’s going to matter. The media may still be capable of setting the narrative, but the voters themselves are less willing to go along with each election cycle. Trump is the ultimate media creation (more the entertainment media than the news media), and, after a months-long build-up, he flopped on opening night.
Anyone searching for clarity tonight had to be disappointed. I wasn’t. The Iowa caucuses are a tiny event in a small, non-representative state. They shouldn’t decide anything, and they didn’t—Martin O’Malley’s and Mike Huckabee’s exits notwithstanding.
Maybe New Hampshire will tell us more.