Internets news is a lie

By Media Farm

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Things over at the Globe—a paper that, like most mid-sized dailies, has been stuck in an endless cycle of circulation losses, plummeting ad revenue and newsroom cutbacks—went from worse to how the Christ are these people still in business last week. The paper has dragged the stock price and profit margin of its owner, the New York Times Company, over the past few years, and on Thursday, with a push from the Globe and the Worcester T&G, the Times Co. posted a first-quarter loss.

A slowing economy hit the paper across all its most important sectors: financial services, automotive, travel and retail. Classifieds continued to be decimated across the board. Good thing the internet is going to save everybody, right?

Yeah, not just yet. The web has only been able to recapture a fraction of the money papers' print editions are bleeding out, and in the first quarter, the Times Co.'s digital properties saw their (already insufficient) growth slow dramatically.

What does all this mean, practically? For one, it would appear unlikely that the Globe's latest round of painful buyouts will be enough to stabilize the paper's finances in the long term. Which means things are likely to get a lot uglier before they get any better. If they ever do. Ugh.

SO IT GOES. And so what, right? The market has clearly spoken, and newspapers have been vanquished. Sooner or later, we'll all end up working for web publishers, which means, sooner or later, we'll all get to write the news in bathrobes and slippers. That can't be half bad, can it?

It might be, actually. It appears that having minimal overhead and zero publishing costs ain't what it used to be. Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, announced last week that he's dumping Wonkette, one of his most iconic and significant sites, along with two others.

Denton is both a giant prick and one of the few businessmen to actually figure out how to make real money by publishing news on the web, and a memo explaining the sales left little doubt that, if this guy's in trouble, the rest of us don't stand a chance.

After noting that Wonkette has won a ton of awards and rode this election cycle to record-setting traffic numbers, Denton threw this at us: "Since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006 ... we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst ... Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession."

Awesome. Just awesome. The only silver lining we could find in this whole shit stew was this response to the request, "Tell us what you want in your New Wonkette": "Does it need to be said? More ass-fucking, please." Oh, and this, too: "Once we figure out a way to monetize buttsecks jokes, the world is ours ... " Truer words have never been hurled through the cyber-ether.

SO IF WRITING NEWS on dead trees doesn't pay the bills anymore because advertisers are throwing buckets of money at the web, but writing news and shattering records for one of the web's best-known brands isn't enough to stave off execution, where does that leave us?

In the arms of untrained, largely unpaid amateurs, apparently. It's bloggy writers of this ilk that brought us two of last week's biggest campaign stories— Barack Obama's ties to an old Weather Underground activist, and Obama's boneheaded generalizations about bitter rural voters.

Reaction to latter story, broken by the Jay Rosen-Arianna Huffington pro-am project Off the Bus, has been especially amusing to watch. Rosen has noted that the established print and broadcast media have done backflips to obliterate the connection between the story and Off the Bus, while Obama's camp, which had previously allowed the blogger in question to post posi-tastic coverage of its fundraisers, whined to the Times that fundraising events are "always off the record."

The only solace we can find in the whole affair is the knowledge that, once we're all out of business, LOLcats with Wi-Fi access will still be able to break news for us, if only because, in this brave post-Macaca era, politicians are still dumb enough to gaze out at a sea of camcorders and voice recorders and speak without ever thinking, "Would this shit not play well on the internet?"