39 Replies to “Not Waiting For The Asteroid”

  2. Now, if only the CBC would follow the papers off that cliff!
    Is it just me, or does that thingosaur look like Avi Lewis?
    No, it’s probably just me — if it was Lewis, it would have its head in the sand. Or up its arse.

  3. This is the internet at work. Ebay, Drudge, and blogs are the three killer applications that are eating the MSM’s lunch. Talk radio started it, the web is finishing it.
    If the main stream media really was an unbiased, unimpeachable news source they might have some hope of survival. But since they are nothing more than the sexy icing that tempts you to read the advertisements, they are screwed.
    There’s a market for Truth with a capital “T” and Integrity with a capital “I”. There’s no market for scare mongering hypocrites selling “how can we fool them today?” political partisanship.
    Hasta la vista, baby!

  4. Re: the Media-saur
    The reality is that 200 year old corporate media and their friends in the political/ruling class elite no longer have a monopoly on disseminating news and opinion.
    The controllers are out of control…their number one tool in creating a nation of disinformed indoctrinated sheep out of a once fiercely independent and civilly passionate people was to control the market place of opinion and ideas…that market place is now global in scope, can reach hundreds of millions instantly in their own language and it is in the hands of common people outside the global elite matrix…it is truely a monumental human revolution of self and global awareness or as Kate graphically alludes to; a cataclysm for the old order elites of controlled/filtered info flow.
    With the power of the free internet the intellect and awareness of the public has been freed and these days the truth travels faster than a contrived political lie….but so does counter revolutionary disinformation. The market place of ideas is now truly open to public discourse and scrutiny…no longer the sole realm of the elite and patrician class….public oversight of elite orthodoxies, agendas and doctrine now has a global mass media scope with interactive discourse capability.
    You can be assured that the elite pound their heads on their exclusive hand crafted objects d’art each day trying to scheme a way to shut down the explosion in public awareness the new media represents…the internet has big enemies and we are not out of the jungle yet.

  5. The ‘dead tree industry’ should turn off the left based on that fact that is costs precious trees to make newspaper … so that would be bad.
    The newspaper industry is completely a forum of leftist, Marxist freedom and enterprise haters pretending to bring objectivity to current events, so the the right has little use for it.
    Looks like it’s another buggy whip story.
    Newspapers as they have become will not be missed.
    I wonder where their employees will find their next workers paradise. Perhaps we are going to see a rash of appy’s into communication departments at all government offices. Maybe a bunch of new hip cool back to the 60s magazines will start appearing on shelves.
    Or maybe there will be a lot of new blogs of the Rabble.ca type that no one will be allowed to comment on unless you show your drivers license and your Liberal, NDP, or Green party membership card.
    This all too entertaining.

  6. “As discussed here earlier, newspaper stocks lost $13.5 billion of their value in the years 2005 and 2006, representing a 20.5% decline during the two-year period.
    Given that the 7.4% drop in share value in the first half of this year is more than a third of the loss experienced in the prior two years, it is clear that the decline in newspaper stocks has accelerated.”
    Buried within his commentary about the collapse of the old media, and mentioned only in passing but not commented upon, was this nifty little nugget of information:
    Chicago Sun-Times – up 5.6%
    New York Times – up 4.6%
    Washington Post – up 3.2%
    When your industry’s supposed and overly-touted decline is “accelerating” at up to 7.4%, and you are not just holding your own but growing better than many other stocks on the stock market… well, maybe its ’cause you got something many people want. Capitalism is a bitch sometimes, eh!
    Oooops. Sorry. Wrong place to be touting the strength, endurance and profitability of the liberal media “old guard”.
    Carry on. As you were.

  7. “The newspaper industry is completely a forum of leftist, Marxist freedom and enterprise haters pretending to bring objectivity to current events, so the the right has little use for it.”
    for the first 130 years of its existence the industry were whores to robber barons who hid their anti free market monopolization, social Darwinism and political corruption under a cloak of Tory/Republican sanctity.
    All that has changed is the social engineers de jour that the corporate media whores out to…leftist social engeering has the same agenda as monopolist feudalist social engineering….controlling the thinking of the sheep and herding them in the direction the current poers that be want them to go…the dead tree industry has been instrumental in this end game for over 2 centuries…the corporate brodcast media has taken over from them to a certain degree…but the main point is that both these medias are ONE WAY, TOP-DOWN information systems.
    The internet allows readers to argue or dissent with editors…THIS is the revolution…two way info flow …primarily driven by bottom up oversight and editorializing.

  8. Ummm Ted
    An increase is only real if you start from positive territory. There numbers are the equivalent of ignoring the principle and just paying the interest on a credit card each month.

  9. Five years from now it will be interesting to see who is left standing. Advertising money is moving to the internet. They know where the eyeballs are parked. Alternatives to the classified ads, a huge source of revenue, are taking shape and eating revenue margins. I bet a lot of these dead tree companies will be gone.
    Dead on, Phantom, what these jokers have ignored is that content counts. I renew the Wall Street Journal every year, it’s pricey, but, I’ll pay for quality. Obviously other will too. I’d also pay extra if I had to have FOX on my cable channels. I haven’t looked at CNN, CBS, ABC or NBC for years.
    Add Instapundit as a great news and blog aggregate. Drudge puts too many junk items up.

  10. Ted – you need to read previous entries at Newsosaur to understand just how those same media outlets have been bleeding in the past couple of years. The figures you note are representative of a small recovery, not growth.

  12. Ted: I’m glad you’re a lawyer and not an economist as the former venal discipline demands no adhesion to actuality … otherwise key indicator market trend dynamics would be as convoluted and dyslexic as a shyster’s summary statements.

  13. All I’m noting is that, while the industry goes down 7.5%, the liberal majors are going up.
    Meanwhile, dead tree media subscriptions are going down generally, AM and FM radio listenership is going down generally, basic network TV viewership is going down generally, CD purchases are down, Hollywood movies are going down generally… but, of course, it ALL has to do with a rejection of liberal content (even when the decline includes the National Post, the Sun chain, Washington Times, and despite readership growth in the last 4 years at the NYT and the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, etc.) and couldn’t possibly be because the internet and other technologies have simply given the public alternative means of becoming brain-dead zombies (renting TV shows, watching TV shows and movies online for free, free access to news from the online versions of the old media and TV broadcasters).
    Like any great conspiracy, the Vast Leftwing Media Conspiracy survives despite all evidence to the contrary.

  14. Ted;
    Maybe if you had done some research you would have found out that the Sun-Times is in trouble and going up for sale, share fell 5.9% on the announcement and have fallen 24% over the last 12 months, so much for the increase, they still have to regain 18.4% (in addition to the reported 5.6% gain) to be even with last year! Here is the link since you seem to do the same type of research as your Lieberal Media Old Guard; http://www.nypost.com/seven/06072007/business/chicago_sun_times_is_under_black_cloud_business_.htm
    The New York Times ad revenues are dropping, the only apparent thing saving them is their Internet business, they own About.com. Their total revenues dropped 8.5% for May and this included an increase in Internet ad revenue of 21.4% so the point of the posting is upheld, print media is failing…. The other thing to note is that the Standard and Poor has cut their bond rating to BBB- one level above Junk Bonds, making it difficult to get any new investment… here is a link on that for you http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/07/new_york_times_bond_rating_cut_1.html so it appears that the NYT uptick is a false positive and soon to become another “For Sale” newspaper. They have just cut 500 jobs/ 4% of their workforce as reported on WNBC, does this sound like success to you?
    The Washington Post Company is a diversified Media and Education company including TV Stations and Cable Companies and magazines so it is not reliant on its print media to remain solvent. It does appear to be fairly healthy but it too could be suffering on the newspaper side and being floated by its other holdings.
    If this is an example of the “strength, endurance and profitability of the liberal media “old guard”. ” then I hope it carries on this way. Do you own shares in any of these companies?
    It is always entertaining to see the Troll-asaur comments on the Media-Saur.

  15. For comparison, and reinforcing my point,6 mth ave circ to 3/31/06 in Canada:
    1. Toronto Star 436,694 0.2%
    2. Globe And Mail 322,807 0.2%
    3. Le Journal de Montréal 267,404 0.2%
    4. La Presse 204,545 0.9%
    5. National Post 203,781 -10.7 (-12% for weekends)
    6. Toronto Sun 179,004 0.4%
    7. Vancouver Sun 165,144 -1.3%

  16. New York Times: dips a little this year for the first time in many years as a result of an increase in the price of the paper and some other changes. Seems to me, if you want to call it a Democrat paper (Bill Clinton would strongly disagree with you on that!), then it has been so for more than the last year.

  18. Ted, the NYT’s just had its bond rating cut to a notch above junk with an outlook that isn’t very positive.
    http://michellemalkin.com/2007/07/11/the-new-york-times-bond-rating-goes-down-down-down/
    The WSJ is up 51.7% and now has twice the circulation as the NYT’s. FOX has eaten CNN’s lunch for the past few years in all news segments. Check Drudge on weekly basis, he posts the weekly ratings.
    It is content, Ted, and it is easy to extrapolate that by looking at the numbers. How long do you think the CBC would stay solvent if it didn’t have protected monopoly status and was cut off the public dole? The content sucks. The quality of the content is mind numbing lefty platitudes, those handful of 5 or 6 sacred memes that lefties keep etched in their brain from their college days and bore the rest of us with.
    Oh, and, if you subtract the Kos moonbats, the Move On moonbats and the few lame lefty sites of note, the internet is a very Conservative dominated space. Just compare the number of comments a day that Kate gets versus you. Robert McClelland vs Kate? Content counts.

  19. Penny:
    No surprise, but I think your partisan blinders missed my point 100%.
    You seem to see the world in a total black or white, left vs. right.
    This probably comes as news to you, but the vast majority of people read newspapers and watch TV/movies and use the internet for non-political reasons.
    So it is completely ridiculous to claim political content is the reason for the decline everywhere or to say that the internet is conservative.
    But like I said, you can’t argue facts with a conspiracy theorist and conspiracies don’t come much larger than The Vast Leftwing Media Conspiracy.

  22. Kate said:
    Ted – you need to read previous entries at Newsosaur to understand just how those same media outlets have been bleeding in the past couple of years. The figures you note are representative of a small recovery, not growth.
    “Dead cat bounce” they call it in the stock market biz.

  23. NEW YORK Americans younger than 30 are reading newspapers — and consuming news in all forms — less and less on a regular basis than their older counterparts, according to a new survey, which revealed teen-agers with the worst regular news habits.
    …
    The findings showed that while 35% of “older adults,” those 31 and older, read a newspaper everyday, just 16% of “young adults,” who were between 18 and 30, did so. Of the teen-agers, only 9% said they read a daily paper, with 46% saying they hardly ever touched a paper or never did.
    http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003611972
    A new study shows that young Americans are shunning newspapers in high numbers, despite the ongoing war in Iraq and the beginning of a new presidential election cycle.
    The New York Times reported on a study released by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, which found teens and most young people aged 30 and below are not following the news closely at all.
    The report, titled “Young People and the News,” sampled 1,800 Americans including teenagers, people aged 18-30, and older adults. “We found that most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,” Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, told the Times.
    “Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren’t acquiring the news habit,” he said.
    Traditional print newspapers have been losing audience for a decade, a trend most editors blame primarily on 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet.
    http://www.newswire.co.nz/main/viewstory.aspx?storyid=382887&catid=16

  24. As the internet has gained stature and gained news reporting gravitas with the people so have MSM and many news wire services including CP, found to be wanting.
    Quite frankly one of the reasons I still subscribe to a regional southern Ontario newspaper (The London Free Press) is basically for the Obituaries and anniversaries the FP carries in the London Ontario region.
    This reason is because I have lived in the London area for many of my seventy-five years and know many people in person or at least by acquaintance, and I am interested in who has been married for fifty or sixty years and who HAS DIED in the region.
    Once the internet has that sufficiently covered , papers like th FP can kiss subscribers in their region goodbye forever.
    And as for the CBC and Canada, I only hope that Bev Oda either nudges Harper to force the CBC to privateize or
    Harper has the courage to move Bev Oda to neuter financially the CBC beyond recognition for the betterment of Canadians.

  26. Ted, I hope you don’t do your own financial planning buddy, because buying media right now is the sure kiss of death to your portfolio.
    Newspapers live and die based on one thing: advertising. Same with TV, same with radio. Who’s gobbling up big company advertising dollars like Moby Dick these days? Google.
    Who’s got small advertisements into an international, search-able form cheap enough for Grandma Jones to sell her tea kettle on? E-Bay.
    Where do you look if you want to find all manner of things for sale in paper form? In New York State its not the Gannet Newspapers, its not the NY Slimes classified section. Its the Penny Saver. Here in Hamilton its the Tri-Ad. Or the Auto-Trader. Or whatever specialized news stand organ carries the thing you want. The local newspaper isn’t where you go.
    Bottom line, big Media in print and on the air is missing the boat. The great ship of profit has sailed and they are all standing on the dock watching it leave.
    Lemme warm up my crystal ball here a second and lay on you what the future holds, Ted baby.
    First, since the advertising dollar gets spent where the advertiser can measure the bang for his buck, companies are increasingly going to go to Google, Yahoo, e-bay and etc. Not comletely, but a lot more than MSM outlets can stand to lose.
    Second, longer term over the next 5 to 10 years hand held wireless is going to be the Next Big Deal. Your average el-cheapo cell phone will be able to send and receive full streaming video, advertisements included. Make the ads searchable (they are already, see Google), add a GPS and voila, you can find the nearest burger joint, bathroom or bordello, depending on your needs of the moment. And surf Small Dead Animals too. From the bathroom of the bordello whilst eating a burger, if you want.
    Co-incidentally making every guy with a cell phone an on-the-spot reporter. You are your own Chritianne Ammanpour. News aggregators selling wisdom, experience and sound analysis will survive. Left leaning hacks will become unemployed.
    Ted, sell that NY Times stock. Possibly the marque will remain, but in a much reduced form. Everybody who works there right now will be getting kicked to the curb.

  27. All that is necessary is to just look at the content of the MSM for a few days to find the reason for the decline. I haven’t bought a newspaper in over 10 years and then it was just for the 1997 election results. My reading of newspapers now is limited to a quick glance at the headlines in the newspaper box on my way to work.
    Based on my upbringing, I should be reading the papers as my parents subscribed to multiple newspapers and magazines and we’d all spent time in the evening reading the days papers. I continued this practice when I left home but soon noticed that the stories I was seeing in the paper had less and less relation to reality as I saw it. The focus of newspapers, and especially TV news, was on sensational stories which seemed to be primarily designed to promote fear among the populace. 25 years ago I discontinued my newspaper subcriptions and read only scientific journals until I started reading newsgroups ~1990. Since then the internet has been my primary source of information. This has only served to highlight much more dramatically the failings and bias of the MSM.
    The MSM is terrified of the internet and thus are in the forefront of scaremongering regarding the internet. There are horror stories of kids finding out how to make explosives on the internet (we used local libraries to get this information in the 1960’s and then no-one really cared as long as we blew things up in safe places), the internet is a haven for pedophiles, etc, etc.
    Right now the only time I’ll read newspaper articles is when patients of mine bring them and the quality of medical reporting is so atrocious that I now tell my patients to ignore anything of a medical nature covered by the MSM unless they get independent confirmation of the topic from a reputable internet source. One particularly egregious example is the “increased heart attack risk” caused by COX-2 anti-inflammatories such as Celebrex. There is a slight increased risk of suffering a heart attack when someone takes celebrex; an effect that can only be seen when one looks at data on millions of patients. The whole reason COX-2’s were developed was because the older COX-1 anti-inflammatories had the nasty effect of causing ulcers that used to kill about 1500 people a year in Canada. No mention of this in the media frenzy over Celebrex. Once this effect of Celebrex on increasing the ability of blood to clot in some people was discovered, other anti-inflammatories were examined and, not surprisingly, Celebrex was not alone. Most of the COX-1’s also have this effect and Ibuprofen is equally likely to give someone a heart attack as Celebrex (as well as an ulcer). This is something that has not been mentioned in the MSM at all probably because of the number of Advil ads that they depend on to spread their mistruths.
    I had patients coming to my office in a panic waving their bottles of Celebrex and accusing me of trying to kill them. Some of them could not be reasoned with for they saw it on TV and therefore it must be true. Those that had an open mind are probably no longer consumers of news from the MSM.
    While the internet is an excellent forum for two way communication, the amount of information is simply overwhelming. This is where trusted information sites come in and SDA is the first place I look for news on the internet now. Kate does a very fine job of selecting topics to post and the quality of the discourse is orders of magnitude more informative than anything one would find in the MSM.

  28. The Phantom, loki — BANG-ON !!!
    And, I might add, the media’s role is to ‘Dumb-down’ the news. And they are good at it.
    I sometimes think it is intentional othertimes I think some, such as Avi Lewis, are justa natural at it.

  29. Subscriptions I have had over the years;
    Macleans
    G&M
    Wpg Free Press
    Time
    Time Canada
    Scientific American
    Wpg Tribune
    The number of subs I have had since being on-line the last 10 years;
    ZERO !!
    I frequent many, many Internet sites regularily, some of are;
    sda
    National News Watch
    Financial Times
    Junk Science
    Drudge
    Andrew Coyne
    Some of the columnists I follow;
    Peter Foster
    Lorrie Goldstein
    Terrence Corcorran
    Chantal Hebert
    Classifieds ?? Craig’s List

  30. Yahoo!Finance…
    New York Times (ticker is NYT)
    Dec.2004 – Net income $292,557,000
    Dec.2005 – Net income $259,753,000
    Dec.2006 – Net income ($543,443,000)
    The brackets denote a LOSS; no one-time
    charges from the consolidated income
    statement.
    The New York Times hit an all-time stock price high in the last quarter of 2002; peak was right around $50.00 per share; it closed today, July 18, 2007, at $23.69.
    Washington Post Company (ticker is WPO)
    Dec.2004 – Net income $331,740,000
    Dec.2005 – Net income $313,363,000
    Dec.2006 – Net income $323,478,000
    commsguy (12:39 P.M.) is correct; the
    newspaper is only one of 5 businesses
    WPO runs; it’s mainly magazines and
    electronic media.
    WPO hit an all time high of around
    $1000.00 per share in January 2005;
    it closed today at $792.80 per share.
    Financials are OK… but the smart money
    isn’t buying the stock.
    Sun Times Media Group (ticker is SVN)
    Dec.2004 – Net income $234,668,000
    Dec.2005 – Net income ($11,969,000) Loss
    Dec.2006 – Net income ($56,673,000) Loss
    The sun Times is a DOG (no pun intended,
    Ted a.k.a. Cerberus, not?)
    SVN was just over $20.00 per share in
    April 2004; it closed today on the
    NYSE at $4.99 per share.
    How’s that now, Ted?

  31. The dinosaur looks vaguely familiar, almost like road kill. Now where have I seen that before? hmmmm

  32. Interesting artwork on the dead raptor — is that your work Kate?
    Very effective.
    Michael

  34. “My reading of newspapers now is limited to a quick glance at the headlines in the newspaper box on my way to work.”
    Calgary seems to be flooded with new, free daily “newsrags” (published by the big guys, I think) over the past six months or so. It’s getting to be almost as annoying as street people asking for money while downtowners run the gauntlet of them.

  36. Some are now telling us that the dinosoars didnt die off but became birds WHAT A LOAD OF BIRDIE POOP IM SURE NO DINO RELETIVE SQUAWK SQUAWK STUPID EVOLUTIONISTS WACKOS IM GOING TO GET VIOLENT WITH THEM IM GOING TO PICK THEIR EYES OUT SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK

  37. They did become birds. My first thought seeing the dino at the start was ‘is that a crow?’ They are evil.

  38. WSJ reports: Newspaper Downturn Goes From Bad to Worse
    editorandpublisher
    We knew it was bad, but an article in the Wall Street Journal today opens, “The downturn in the newspaper industry is getting worse.”
    The paper’s Emily Steel quotes Ed Atorino, an analyst with financial broker Benchmark Co., saying, “Right now, you’ve got a perfect storm.” He predicts total ad revenue will fall 4.3% this year, one of the steepest in history.
    Here is an excerpt from the article. The full piece is at the Journal Online. * …-
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1868217/posts

  39. IM WARNING YOU TRANIO DONT MAKE ME VIOLENT SQUAWK SQUAWK EVOLUTION IS STUPID SQUAWKS SQAUWK SQUAWK

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