KEEP ROCKIN’! LA Times Bemoans Death of California Journalism – Fails to Acknowledge It Helped Kill It.
What the Times missed entirely is how newspapers – at least in part – brought this situation upon themselves. When the internet really started going – say, about 15 years ago, the papers decided they needed to get on board and began offering their stories for free on the assumption that people would stick with their trusted news source and they could sell banner ads and the like.
Oops.
In reaction to declining revenue, the papers started slashing jobs, mostly local news jobs. Papers then found out they had no one to cover local news – go to council meetings, sit through planning commissions and such – and that they had forfeited the one massive advantage they had over tech: typically trusted local news coverage that cannot be found anywhere else.
Oops, again.
And then things got very silly – papers that had literally sold for a billion dollars just a few years before were being bought for their real estate alone and billionaires – like the Times’ own Patrick Soon-Shiong – started picking them up on the cheap for influence purposes, hoping that they would at least break even.
But the destruction of daily grind local news at the bottom and the plaything mentality at the top only amplified the problems, particularly in the case of the Times which became the domain of Soon-Shiong’s permanent grad student, horrifically woke nightmare daughter Nika.
Her politics, reportedly, drove and drives the news coverage of the Times and that was that. And yet another mistake was made – and not just by the Times – that by being so woke, so scolding, so ideologically driven, so pointless, so full of propaganda that the majority of the public that wanted to read a daily newspaper simply turned away because there was no point to it – no point, that is, if you wanted to get relatively unbiased hard news coverage of local issues.
The Times also notes how sad it is that so many “journalists” have been laid off recently. At least it mentioned its own layoffs, no matter how obliquely.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Exhausted Journalist Finally Gets To Bed After Long Day Of Copying And Pasting Democrat Talking Points.
(Classical reference in headline.)