Tried and true 20th century media are collapsing. The numbers of broadcast and cable television viewers are declining. With the announcement earlier in the week of the New York Daily News chopping its newsroom staff in half, the last days of cities with multiple daily newspapers are upon us.
But there's bad news for new digital media too. Facebook lost nearly $120 billion in value yesterday. The market reacted to Facebook's reduced growth forecasts. One of the chief drivers for lower projected growth is that the company is having to staff a vast -- think Terry Gilliam's Brazil -- bureau of censors.
A new day is dawning but it's not clear if the weather is going to be fair or foul. The old media is dying, and the new media is pausing because of government attempts to exert control, as well as basic "peak screen time" burnout.
What follows are some key passages gleaned from this week:
33 million cord cutters
According to a media research firm, 33 million people — or 32.8 percent of television watchers — have cut the cord. That is, they’ve canceled pay TV in favor of “over the top,” or streaming, television services. That’s more than last year’s projections of 27.1 million, he typed as his shiny little black streaming device purred lovingly in the background. [Mashable]
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[I]nvestors responded Thursday by hammering the stock of Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies. Shares of the social media giant fell 19 percent, wiping out roughly $120 billion of shareholder wealth, among the largest one-day destruction of market value that a company has ever suffered.
Investors dumped Facebook shares after the company reported disappointing second-quarter earnings, in which the company warned of a sharp slowdown in sales growth in coming quarters along with rising spending on security and privacy enhancements.
[snip]
It was the details of Facebook’s report that seemed to spook investors. The company’s quarterly revenue fell slightly short of meeting the expectations of Wall Street analysts. And executives warned that the company would invest heavily in privacy and security, and that revenue growth would most likely slow in coming quarters.
[snip]
Still, the sheer size of Facebook’s fall on Thursday became a focus for investors. The decline in Facebook’s market value was roughly equivalent to the entire value of some of the country’s best-known companies, including McDonald’s, Nike and the industrial conglomerate 3M."Facebook Starts Paying a Price for Scandals" by Sheera Frenkel
Facebook has also said it wanted to hire 20,000 people by the end of 2018 to help review content posted on the site and to work on its security team. The company’s head count has already risen 47 percent since last year, to 30,275.
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The News had a digital reach of 23 million, but it wasn’t enough. The challenge of wringing profits from page views has eluded much of the industry, and the paper proved unable to end its losing streak. According to securities filings, it lost $23.6 million in 2016. Since then, its business has continued to suffer.
[snip]
The longtime home of the columnists Jimmy Breslin, Dick Young and Liz Smith and the cartoonist Bill Gallo, The News reveled in its role as the voice of the average citizen. Etched into the stone above the entrance of its former home, the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, is a phrase attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them.”
“You used to see everybody reading the newspaper on the subway,” said Michael Daly, a onetime News columnist who now writes for The Daily Beast. “The News was the right size. It was the perfect size for the biggest city.”
One of its most famous headlines — “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” from 1975 — summed up President Gerald R. Ford’s refusal to send federal aid to a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Ford later said the headline had played a role in his losing the 1976 presidential election."Newspapers in New York, Like Their Readers, Are Vanishing" by Andy Newman
There are, of course, still people who treasure the solidity of newsprint. Some of them are even young. Ella Noman, 25, who works in a flower shop near the 30th Avenue subway station in Astoria, Queens, said she read the store’s copy of The Daily News every day, in part because she felt that the news she sees on social media can be unreliable.
“Not everything comes in the internet,” Ms. Noman said. “It goes really fast and I can’t find much detail.”
But they are fewer and fewer. Domingo Taveras, 55, who works at the Vinmel and Jose Barber Shop on West 110th Street in Manhattan, said he missed the days when customers would read the paper while waiting for a haircut.
“Inside this barber shop, nobody reads The Daily News, or any paper at all, to be honest,” he said.
That includes Mr. Taveras himself. He gets most of his news from NY1 or the occasional copy of The Post he finds lying around. When he reads The Daily News, he does so on his phone. (The News installed a paywall on its website in February. Readership promptly tanked, The Post gleefully reported.)
Mr. Brown, the M.T.A. maintenance worker, said he had noticed The News shift focus to its online content, which is unapologetically heavy on sensational out-of-town news.
“I could see the quality of the coverage was diminishing over time,” Mr. Brown said as he stood near the Municipal Building in Downtown Manhattan. “The recent times that I’ve had the paper in my hands, the print, the quality of the paper, it just didn’t look like The Daily News that I grew up with.”
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