When journalists talk about Wall Street harvesting newspapers for organs, this is what we’re talking about. The Chicago Tribune already has layoffs to hit a 10% profit margin. Now a hedge fund comes in and wants immediate 20% profit margins. And all the rest of us are the losers.
Even if you’re an uptight fiscal conservative who thinks ruthless hedge fund management is just what can whip your local newspaper into its tightest shape so the profits can be sunk into needed growth, I have news for you about where that cash is going. dfmworkers.org/in-court-filin…
These hedge funds aren’t stupid. They’re card sharks who have figured out how to win every hand. They know grandma and grandpa will keep paying subscription money to the paper they’ve spent their entire lives with; they just never tell your folks that nobody works there anymore.
Anyway, yes, this is ultimately a public policy problem. The current policy is capitalist, to encourage newspaper owners to siphon cash out of local newspapers to invest in other more promising industries. The current public policy is *not* to ensure people have good local news.
The tax code could be made more favorable for local publishers or journalist cooperatives; the nation could directly invest in public options, like a stronger local PBS or BBC; advertising monopolies could be regulated to give publishers a fairer shake. These are policy choices.
There are alternative to the status quo. We just have to want them bad enough.
Creative innovation from private industry will always be an option in revolutionizing the business of local news. But last I saw, the hottest new thing in media is an app where executives go to hear themselves talk.
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Okay one last plague thread for the night, but I promise it’s a good one: I wanted to know what happened to the Spanish influenza after it waned in 1919, and it turned out that it just became another seasonal flu that circulated among people each year.........UNTIL.........
Did you know that flu strains replace each other? one will circulate for decades and decades, and then a new one comes along and the other one disappears? That’s what happened to Spanish flu in 1957.
Looking at academic studies of the effectiveness of social-distancing during the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. The cities that did it early and did it consistently fared better than the cities that were laxer. When they stopped (see bottom bars), sometimes the flu surged back.
Kind of rough, but America's experience during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 mimics what we just saw in China: Wuhan got slammed by the initial outbreak and shut down too late, but other cities had time to watch and act and got spared the brunt: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
While Twitter was down, I was searching the L.A. Times archives for stories about the Spanish flu and found, like, the quintessential 1919 newspaper story.
Don't worry about the coronavirus right now. Worry about the flu, which has killed ~10,000 Americans since October.
“The likelihood of an American being killed by the flu compared to being killed by the coronavirus is probably approaching infinity.” latimes.com/california/sto…
Also I just found this really helpful CDC infographic about the differences between seasonal flu (the existing flu everybody gets all the time) and pandemic flu (when there's a new type of flu). cdc.gov/flu/resource-c…
You may not remember, but the last flu pandemic (H1N1) was in 2009, it started in the United States, killed up to half a million people in the first year it circulated, and then it just... became another seasonal flu that people get. cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-r…
"Newly uncovered documents show the consulting giant helped ICE find 'detention savings opportunities' — including measures the agency’s staff sometimes viewed as too harsh on immigrants." nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/…
"McKinsey’s team also looked for ways to accelerate the deportation process ... The consultants, three people who worked on the project said, seemed focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations" nytimes.com/2019/12/03/us/…
NEW: Katie Hill’s husband was shopping around “the whole story” about their divorce, shortly before naked photos of her were given to GOP consultants who had previously worked for Hill’s 2018 opponent, Steve Knight.
@finneganLAT A spokeswoman for Steve Knight just sent me his statement in response to our story about how former campaign advisors had received naked pictures of Katie Hill. The nuance he seems to be highlighting here is that they didn't work for his *2018* campaign.
@finneganLAT The NRCC was also approached about the naked photos of Katie Hill before they were published, and an NRCC spokeswoman told us this morning that NRCC the committee “never shopped, possessed or circulated photos of Congresswoman Hill." latimes.com/politics/story…