What's Behind the Newspaper Crash & Burn? Lefties.

In the last week or so, newspapers--including the local kitty-litter-liner--have been cutting salaries and imposing furloughs on staff.  Ad revenues have dropped off, as you might expect.  So some reporters will disappear and return; others will probably just disappear.  This is despite an upswing in subscriptions and "clicks" by the way--bear that in mind.

(This blogger will NOT suggest that the affected reporters and other staffers Learn To Code.  That would be nasty or curmudgeonly, or something like that.  Nope.  Not going there.)

Anyhow.  The revenue problem is partially due to the hard-left's invention of "ad blocking."

...Most advertisers purchase online advertising programmatically, through ad networks. With programmatic advertising, advertisers basically buy people, not publishers. They identify a person by, for example, past search history or they buy information, and then market directly to that specific person — whether that person is on their favorite sports site, news site, YouTube, wherever that person likes to visit… The ads follow the person. Notable exceptions are porn sites.

Once upon a time, programmatic advertisers did not care where on the Internet they reached their target persons — if those persons liked Fox News or Breitbart News, Fox News or Breitbart News would get paid. If those persons liked CNN or the New York Times, CNN and the New York Times would get paid. That’s how it was, until…

Trump was elected, and the left-wing blacklisters came along....

The left-wing blacklisters such as Media Matters and Sleeping Giants were very effective in scaring the bejabbers out of advertisers.  The weapon of 'blocking' was used against sites such as Breitbart and Fox News, and Fox reacted with a change in its news policy, just as did Drudge.

But now that weapon is biting the "news" organizations in the ass.  Hard.

...Turns out — as you read in the story excerpted above — advertisers not only care which news publishers their programmatic ads appear on, they began to care about which specific content their ads appeared against. Plane crash story? We don’t want to sell cars next to that story! COVID-19? We don’t want to sell cars against those stories! As is so often the case, the blacklisters created a monster that they can no longer control — a monster now running amok destroying establishment media outlets, too.

This changed the entire dynamic of advertising.

Terrified advertisers now, when placing ad buys, add words to a block list so that their product will not appear next to certain content. And now,.... one of the most popular words on the block list is “coronavirus,” and what subject is every news outlet in America covering right now? The coronavirus. The very subject skittish advertisers want nothing to do with for fear a Sleeping Giants or a Media Matters or another member of the left-wing Appropriate Police will launch a hate jihad against them: How dare you profit from death!

Here’s the short version: While Sleeping Giants and Media Matters were relentlessly pushing to blacklist Breitbart out of business, they ended up altering the way advertisers place their ads, and now that alteration is threatening to annihilate the mainstream news media whose ideas the blacklisters DO approve of....

Why yes, yes indeed:  the "news" people are gutless wonders. 

And of course, the New York Times is now pushing for FedGov funding of "news" papers.  Just like in Communist China.