THE GREAT CIRCLE ROUTE

 Some might say that any fool can see by now that it is impossible to market a print newspaper in today's climate. The wonder is that anybody even tries. Nobody believes a word they write anymore except die-hard partisans and they have been dying off, a lot. They're old.

The major flaw with the newspaper was always there even from the beginning. It had an angle. In the old days that angle included a couple of drivers that are now long gone. The old papers had to care deeply about marketing their paper to the largest audience possible because the lion's share of the income came from advertising and the personals sections of the papers and you could charge more if your reader base was large and deep and broad. The internet poisoned the well.

The newspapers decline was sudden but it took multiple passes to achieve near universal death. Kind of like a strafing run on a column stretched along miles of road out there on the steppe. You can't kill everything on a single pass. The newspapers slowly lost the personal section to the Auto Trader and an infinite number of niche papers that then went online. That was revenue gone forever. They started losing the advertisers to google and they never came back either.

The width, depth and breadth of the reader base then became the sole driver of newspaper success and when that happened everything else was promptly sacrificed on the altars of DEI, race politics, socialist revisionist history, social justice, BLM, the purity of diversity and all the rest of the blather socialist liberals believe with all their rotten little hearts. In other words, the base slowly declined to incorporate the soy commando and the pussyhat wearing brigades who deny reality with all their strength.

A paper that writes for the likes of them does not willingly embrace reality. It goes far out of its way to avoid all contact with reality. I mean seriously, reading that the Washington Post had 14 global warming columnists/reporters....srsly? 

I still play the NYT games every day because I have, through my libraries, a free pass that lets me get my wordle on and crush the spelling bee every day for free. This does mean though that I occasionally see the headlines of the NYT as I wend my way to the Games section online. They are almost never anything about the real world and in fact ignore the real world to the maximum possible extent and that includes them stamping their little feet, fingers in ears and screeching whenever the President fails to do as commanded by the Socialist moralizers. This is coming from a guy who used to spend most Sundays sitting in the dappled shade of a nice little coffee house in Del Mar with the entire NYT in front of him slurping coffee and reading every section except fashion and stocks.

Has changed very little in 30 years

 

In the pre-internet days the only papers worth reading were the NYT because it was the only one that followed world news at all and it did a fairly credible job of it up until about 1999. It's counterpart that I did enjoy was only really available overseas because as I recall the International Herald Tribune was a slacker in the distribution department. As you know that was a paper operated by the WP and NYT in concert and they used to make fairly decent readable music back then but I only ever found it overseas and that's a long way to go for a morning paper.

We're in the final days of the print news but it is curious to see that what remains still relies on that fixture that makes them both necessary and attractive, they have to appeal to a wide, deep and broad reader base or they are nothing at all. Most newspapers forgot all about that as the professionals jumped ship during the advertising and personals collapse. What was left was just the ideologues and they are as blind to market forces as a sea slug. They cannot see or accept that they must appeal to the broadest base or they lose their jobs. 

All that said, I do miss The Drudge Report of olde. It was edited by a news man that pointed his readers at expositions that appealed to a broad spectrum of readers unlike the current sea slug who will only curate news from socialist think tanks and people pretty far out on the spectrum. I suspect even sea slugs are better informed from not reading the Drudge in its current form.  

I find the appeal of X increases as I only read the people that I follow. I find that a little worrying. I'm turning into one of those people...... 

You’re screaming “zero arrests???” like a toddler who didn’t get the pony he was promised, while completely ignoring that the arrests that actually mattered already happened under the evidence chain Trump himself helped start.

Let’s spell this out in letters big enough for your… https://t.co/LGATCm6UAz

— LHGrey™️ (@grey4626) February 10, 2026