In 1993, the New York Times pad $1.1 billion to acquire the Boston Globe. The paper is now up for sale with offers coming in around $50 million.
The NY Times also owned WQXR-FM – a FM classical music station that they sold a couple years ago to WNYC. It was started in 1939 when basically there were no FM receivers, and FM remained undeveloped until after World War II.
As much as I despise the NY Times, I wonder what kind of a country we will have when our only news sources are the propaganda operations of foreign governments (Russia Today, Al Jazeera (Qatar), BBC, Press TV (Iran)
We won’t lack for our own propaganda. What scarcely passes as “media” in the US is busy professing the socialist ways with blatent tints of Communism. The Times is an example of a failed business model. If we are capitalist, we let if fail and someone will rise to fill the vacuum. If we are socialist, the government pumps billions of taxpayer dollars into propping it up. In either case, if success in business was easy – we would all be wealthy.
Newspapers mostly got their revenue from ads, not subscription revenue. There were a few exceptions – the Christian Science Monitor and the pre Newscorp Wall Street Journal.
The portion of revenue from classified ads has gone away to places like Facebook and mister.com
Who is going to pay for news when people expect things to be free? Pay walls have a mixed track record whether they can be a successful business model.
The Washington Times to me is the iconic Conservative newspaper and maybe the Pittsburgh Tribune. Advertisers are scared away because they don’t want bad publicity if the paper prints something a liberal activist takes offense to. The people in New York running ad agencies are typically New England area college graduates who have no idea what Iowa is like and no interest in finding out
I can not strongly enough recommend this short wonderful underrated song from 1989 called “Newspapers”. The lyrics are superb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB7GbhdUmFw
Won’t load on iPad – found the lyrics. That pretty much says it.
Try this – it is song # 46
https://myspace.com/officialstanridgway/music/songs
Ridgway is a great song writer and that album was one of the best from 1989. #26 “Going Southbound” is quite good too.