Megan McArdle had a post a few days ago touching on Murdoch’s influence in Britain, saying “As far as I know, studies of media bias generally find that the political slant of newspapers tracks the politics of their readership; the New York Times is not visibly left-leaning because its reporters are fooling the folks on the Upper West Side, as conservatives complain, but because the folks on the Upper West Side demand news sources that agree with them”. It would be great if we had an experiment where an exogenous change occurs in a newspaper’s political support. And John Sides at the Monkey Cage says that’s basically what happened when some British papers switched to supporting Labour in 1997.
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July 26, 2011 at 7:33 am
Obviously it’s a two-way street of influence. The general question is one of mechanisms. How does the newspaper influence its readers, and how do the customers influence the business. The specific question is, given any particular publication and the evolving competitive ecology, what is the relative strength of each mechanism?
We know the New York Times is influential. We also know that it is no longer being managed to be all that profitable – and I would guess that profitability is a strong proxy measure of the customer influence on the publication. A more profitable company is responding to its base and tailoring itself to their preferences.
Now, we know the entire sector is suffering and the question then becomes whether the NYT could be run profitably. I would argue that it could be for three reasons: 1. It’s main circulation rivals, the WSJ and USAToday, are run profitably, so it seems the NYT could be as well, and 2. It’s the “last man standing” in the left-leaning truly national papers, and so it should have a stronger hold on its niche, and 3. My sense of things is that people are increasingly tribal and loyal in terms of partisanship in news publications (in other words, our press has become more “European”), and so the NYT should be able to hold on to its customers with greater ease and therefore extract greater rents from them (especially since they have fewer alternatives).
Despite these strengths, and the likely options available to be run in a more lucrative manner (assuming the management is competent, which I will) – the NYT remains an economically struggling institution that is selling off assets (like its stake in the Red Sox) to stay afloat.
My hunch is that this is a conscious decision on their part to value the content’s influence-over-readership over the market’s influence-on-the-content.
July 26, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Don’t know as much about newspaper and NYT economics. It sounds like you’re saying NYT is evolving to be something like a larger version of The New Republic?
I wouldn’t necessarily assume high competence by the management. The publisher (Sulzberger?) seems to me to be a product of multigenerational nepotism and not a product of meritocratic ascension.
When I read the NYT, I usually feel like I’m reading a dumber version of expert blogs, except for the ones that they’ve bought.
July 26, 2011 at 12:03 pm
When needed, it’s one way street all the way. Russia, 1996 elections: in he preceding year, the incumbent president has approval ratings hovering around 1% but he has support of the handful of guys to whom he just sold the entire country’s economy for peanuts. The guys get together and coordinate actions: they buy and institute tight control of every media of any importance and they pour tons of money into election campaign. No thuggery, no violence, no election fraud – just pure propaganda non-stop. The result: Yeltsin wins easily and the rape of Russia continues unabated.
July 26, 2011 at 12:26 pm
When were the years Russia wasn’t being raped -take it maybe from about 1700 until today. I’m curious about your take.
July 26, 2011 at 9:44 pm
The answer would heavily depend on definition of rape and a reference point. As a general observation, 19th century was better than others.
July 28, 2011 at 4:23 am
In relative terms, there is no doubt that 1913 was the best year in Russian history.
July 27, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Felix Salmon the Sulzberger’s running their paper like something other than a business, and buying surprisingly (to him) successful here.
As this paper notes, there’s not a lot of good research on standard of living in old pre-Soviet Russia. But they make an attempt at it. And speaking of Tsarist Russia, check out Serf’s Up on how the system came into being.