Thread by @asymmetricinfo

All right, guys, it's the Daily News tweetstorm you've all been waiting for. Safe to exhale now.

washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-par…

For starters: my memories of childhood weekends are inextricably linked with my father bringing home all three papers from the newsstand downstairs, and then solemnly removing the comics from the Daily News and passing them over. It is, in a small way, personal for me.

Obviously not as personal as it was for a lot of great journalists who lost their jobs yesterday. Just making the full disclosure.

Onwards: what Tronc did to the Daily News yesterday is ... well, it's about the kind of strategy you'd expect from a company that *chose* to call itself "Tronc", edging out "March First" as the worst corporate rebranding in history.

It's almost impossible to see how the Daily News makes its way back from this. It may linger on for a while, but whenever it goes, you'll be able to look back at yesterday's meeting and see that this was when the final crisis began.

This is not a strategy to save the paper. It's a strategy to feast on the paper's corpse. It's awful to watch.

But here's the hard truth for journalists who are aghast that Tronc could do this: Tronc isn't killing the Daily News. Readers and advertisers are killing the Daily News.

Readers by going elsewhere for their news. Advertisers by fleeing newspapers altogether in favor of platforms that don't do reporting--either their own websites, or places like Google and Facebook.

Tronc could be the nicest, sweetest, most generous owners in the world, and all we'd be talking about was delaying the inevitable. NYC cannot support four newspapers.

When the bloodletting is done, we'll be lucky if there's a market for as many as ten traditional newspapers in the country. I think that's probably double the level that can be supported on subscriptions--which is now the only even arguably viable strategy.

This makes me deeply sad. I know it makes many of my readers deeply sad. And to the folks who are crowing about the demise of the "mainstream media" from either left or right--it should make you deeply sad too. Because you depend on that media.

The kind of in-depth local reporting that newspapers do is the reason that your politicians aren't robbing you blind.

You want to claim that we don't do a good enough job? Fair enough: one can always do better. But never say "it couldn't be worse". Unless you live in North Korea, it could *always* be worse.

You want to talk about how we're biased? Yeah, human beings are biased. That comes standard with the vehicle. But the news could be even more biased, like being wholly owned subsidaries of a political party or a corporation that doesn't want reporters poking into its affairs.

And all the new media outlets you think are going to replace the hated "MSM" are ultimately parasitic on it. Go to your favorite fast-n-cheap web outlet and see how many of the stories are either criticizing some MSM story, or opinionizing about it.

(I'm not sneering. I started as a blogger. I think that new web media has been insanely valuable, partly by correcting some of the faults and biases of the MSM, and partly just by doing stuff we'd never have thought up on our own. But they're complements, not substitutes).

Somehow in the twentieth century, newspapers figured out how to scam department stores into paying them to tell the local citizenry which city councillors were corrupt. It was a magnificent think for us, and for America. But it's ending.

In the words of economist Herbert Stein, "If something can't go on forever, it will stop". Well, journalists can't go on finding out stuff you need to know unless someone's willing to pay them for it. Advertisers and readers no longer are.

If you like having reporters keeping your local officials from going too far off the rails, then you have a responsibility to support that, by subscribing first, but ultimately, by helping journalists find a more sustainable model.

But journalists also have to be realistic: businesses aren't going to pay us to lose them money. That's a charity, not a business. Don't expect corporate owners to maximize your job prospects and the readership's civic benefits, rather than shareholder value.

And sadly, stripping the asset by providing a bad product to the holdouts who are too stubborn to cancel their subscriptions may actually be the way to maximize shareholder value, precisely because daily newspapers are dying.

All the people saying "How is this a good long-term strategy?" are completely missing the point: there is no good long term strategy. There is no long term strategy. There is no long term.

As far as I can see at this point, most non-business journalism is going to end up being done as either a charity, or a badly compromised form of corporate advertising, or it's not going to be done. Plan accordingly.

This doesn't make me happy. It makes me miserable. It's horrible. But I think looking horrible straight in the face is where we need to start. And then we need to start talking about how we set up foundations to do local news.

I can imagine laws that could facilitate this, something like New York's co-op laws for housing. But mostly, I think we need to explain how urgent this is to readers and local philanthropists in cities where there's still something to save.

"Because help us rescue our newspaper" is a really hard sell *after* the asset has been stripped by vulture owners and it's down to ten staffers frantically recycling press releases into enough content to slap around their few remaining classified ads.

Newspapers need to be saved while there's still something to save. If you live outside of one of the top few cities by population, but still have a local newspaper that's newspapering, get urgent. Subscribe. Form a foundation. Save it. Because it's worth saving.

Which brings us to the end of an unusually bleak tweetstorm. You can read the column here. washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-par…

I meanwhile, am off to do some serious moping.