The Business

Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it's actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it's primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.

And, of course, I would add that the broader logic of the internet is toward disaggregation of content -- the fact that newspapers cover such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads probably won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere. On the other hand, there may be a corrupting impact of some of this cross-subsidization -- I can't help but suspect that the importance of real estate advertising to papers may have distorted their coverage of the housing bubble on the way up.

Comments

mais qu'est-ce qui arrivera à ces bureaux essentiels?

Posted by JonE | July 18, 2008 3:54 PM

I know in one newsroom, the dropping housing market led to less ads. It didn't mean less coverage. It just meant no annual pull-out section showing how much home prices went up and where.

In other words, in cases I've seen, drops in ads from a certain industry never affected coverage but reporters were aware of it.

Posted by John | July 18, 2008 3:57 PM

Nice post. Very interesting take on this.

Posted by Exile on Ericsson St. | July 18, 2008 4:35 PM

It's a terrific post.

But let me take issue with one conclusion (or is it an insinuation?) I don't think there's any question that the coverage in the Sunday real estate sections of most major papers is pure puffery. It's of a piece with the automotive reviews - marginal news coverage generated to justify the section, and sell ads. Every nieghborhood is lovely, every home is special. It's a joke, and always has been.

But in most newsrooms, that's a seperate operation from the business desk - or at worst, a specialized beat. I don't see much crossover between reporters covering, say, HUD or Fannie, and those covering beach homes.

The real problem, I think, is that most business sections don't have the cream of the crop. There are some very talented business writers, mind you, but politics and wars are the sexy parts of the news business. Compunding that is the fact that most business sections are written for business people. So there's often insufficient skepticism of markets and companies.

There's blame to share around the newsmedia for this, but not because they were taking ad dollars. And as we're doling out the blame, it's also worth remembering that more than a few reporters were out there waving red flags - just no one paid attention.

Posted by Cynic | July 18, 2008 4:45 PM

won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere

Awesome typo! Way to geaux!

Posted by Shine | July 18, 2008 4:58 PM

Heh, it's my thing to ridicule MY's typos Shine, but more importantly, MY is correct here & should be commended.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bureau#Noun

Bureaux is a completely acceptable plural form of the noun bureau.

Posted by MY Strikes Again | July 18, 2008 5:35 PM

for those who would correct others "typos":
first, be sure that you're right.
i'm looking at you, Shine.

Posted by bill | July 18, 2008 5:57 PM

The standard modern English plural is bureaus. Yes, bureaux is 'correct' but it's not used, which means it's really not correct any longer. Or maybe you're going to go to the aerodrome in your motorcar and board an aeroplane for the continent? You'll have to stop over at Shannon, you know. Perhaps you'll a pay a call on one or two of the news bureaux whilst you're there.

The major print media went through a transition early in the 20th century from making money from the subscriptions they sold to the advertisements they sold, subscriptions becoming then a valuable commodity to sell to advertisers.

This is how a great deal of diversity in U.S. news perspective was destroyed and then consolidated around a comparatively conservative establishment perspective.

If it is time, a century later, to move away from that model of paying for news, well, it isn't a transition which has never been made before, and neither is there anything magical about this model which merits mourning.

Posted by El Cid | July 18, 2008 7:05 PM

Hence the explosion of "lifestyle" crap (my description) in the Wall Street Journal the past several years, and their introduction of a weekend edition awhile back (It is true that there is more business news on weekends than there used to be, what with big mergers increasingly announced on Sunday nights and Paulson/Bernanke's recent penchant for Saving the World prior to Monday morning Asian market openings). The great thing about reading it exclusively online is that it is easier for me to avoid the crap.

Posted by Tom | July 18, 2008 7:07 PM

Then Matt should, from here-on-out, spell color as "colour", and theater as "theatre."

While he's at it, maybe Matt can begin speaking in at "posh" Yankee accent that McArdle misses so much.

Posted by Shine | July 18, 2008 7:38 PM

Of course, I violate Muphry's Law with my witty rejoinder to Bill.

D'Oh!

Posted by Shine | July 18, 2008 7:41 PM

I think there is a lot of bad in NY Times political news (and other news) coverage. Were they one of the offenders (like the WaPo) that covered Pope JP's death prominently for days? A couple of days would have done nicely. Anyway, it's that kind of bias that's made me trust the NYT a lot less.

I probably (if I was reading newspapers) would prefer the news from a Wall St. Journal from a library (so I don't pay them) as a capsule form (you know they don't like to misinform their own people) and then go to other papers like the WaPo and NYT to pick out what elaboration I believe based on the basic facts I got from WSJ. Of course, the people who mess up our news are probably powerful enough to be everywhere, so you could expect them to put some crap in the WSJ if they felt they had to to play against liberals' expectations.

It's sad that the AP really got sent down the drain. It really seemed that their articles were a source of a lot of straight stories you couldn't find anywhere else for a while. Probably they had been infiltrated for a really long time and they just went south to make a lot of liberals lose hope that the country didn't totally suck yet.

Anyway, when you're younger, the NYT looks like a good source of news, and while there still may be a lot of facts in it, when you get older, it turns out you really can't trust the NYT in the final analysis- especially since Bush got elected and 9/11 happened, and the stupid-class freaked out and decided to try to take over our country.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 1:20 AM

It's sad that the AP really got sent down the drain. It really seemed that their articles were a source of a lot of straight stories you couldn't find anywhere else for a while.

I bet the AP's role vis-a-vis the news-screwer-uppers, was to cover things that legitimately deserved coverage (since they were lower-profile than other news outlets) just so it looked less to outsiders like there was an orchestrated media blackout in our country-- like there was somebody who would cover the stuff that called for coverage, and that the only reason the biggest papers ignored important stories was just because they had a lot of idiots working for them (not so with the ostensibly more professional and less-bottom-line conscious AP). This was because it would hurt our reputation in other First World western nations if we weren't free, which, oops, turns out to be the case.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 1:30 AM

This was because it would hurt our reputation in other First World western nations if we weren't free, which, oops, turns out to be the case.

Turns out not to be the case.

You can blame malicious hackers for well-placed typos like this, because it sure ain't me doing it.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 1:34 AM

Newspapers have two advantages that I can see over pure internets operations.

The first is that they bring in enough revenue to pay people to gather news. I don't see any website getting enough eyeballs to be able to do that. I'm aware that most papers in this country don't really have "news gathering" operations and rely on wire services feeds. These will probably go away.

The other advantage is that it is still pleasant to read a newspaper in a cafe or on a train ride.

I find that I can keep up with news about my neighborhood through local blogs. I can see small town papers disappearing as well as middle brow papers that mostly repackage wire service stories. The two models I see surviving are the "quality" papers that add their own comment, such as the WSJ and the Times, and the prole tabloids at the other end for people still not comfortable with using the internet (note that only the New York market is large enough to support these).

Also, the main problem with newspapers over the past fifteen years, seen most acutely with the Washington Post but it also happened to the Times, is that they started producing alot of bad product, too many lifestyle pieces that insulted their readers intelligence, or news and business pieces that were thinly disguised press releases or otherwise propeganda. This has nothing to do with the internet, except to help spur that medium's growth.

Posted by Ed | July 19, 2008 1:39 AM

Turns out not to be the case.

You can blame malicious hackers for well-placed typos like this, because it sure ain't me doing it.

Turns out I wrote it right the first time, but this is the kind of thing you end up writing when typos you didn't write show up in your comments all the time.

Posted by Swan | July 19, 2008 3:17 AM

Why did Playboy interview Jimmy Carter?

So that subscribers who "read it for the articles" will buy it.

People who would be ashamed to buy Martha Stewart Living are perfectly willing to buy their lifestyle porn in the plain grey wrapper of serious news.

Posted by Don Marti | July 27, 2008 1:23 PM