BILL MOYERS HAS A SAD: What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore? Moyers, of course, was always a political operative, sometimes with a byline. And that gets to this comment from Thomas Lipscomb that I saw on Facebook:

It’s so simple even a journalist should understand it. Anyone who has been a real reporter does.

Print media are MASS MARKET MEDIA.

When reporters become “journalists” they ignore the market which sustains their economic model and start worrying about their peers in the business and handing one another awards and citations. And the journalists being hired out of the hothouses of American academia today are so deracinated from the market they need to serve that it became chic to have contempt for it as a great mob of the unwashed clinging to its guns and bibles. No more uncredentialed rough-hewn geniuses need apply these days.

And the vital information the mass market used to expect from its newspapers, like the make up of the rioting teenaged crowd that trashed a shopping center yesterday, was carefully kept out of the paper as being possibly “divisive.” This makes it impossible to calculate degrees of shopping risk, so retail sales and advertising dives and Amazon, which doesn’t advertise, thrives.

In fact a lot of the stuff the mass market wants to see in the paper, as we know from a century’s worth of market research has been pruned by elitists wanting to elevate the tone. This isn’t surprising since more than 90% of people in the business are so far left politically from at least 50% of their market that the notion of balanced press coverage today is a bad joke.

Alas, the only award that counts is circulation. Pulitzer, Hearst, and Edward Bernays all understood this.

So now the “journalists” finally have the papers that cater to THEIR tastes and there just aren’t enough journalists buying news papers to support the new business model.

Exeunt omnes pursued by a bear market.

Who could have seen this coming?