The Washington Post and the NYT are not thriving. They're in serious trouble. From Wiki:
Quote:
|
The New York Times Company, hard-pressed for cash as its shares slid below five dollars per share, suspended its dividend, sold and leased back part of its headquarters, and sold preferred shares to Mexican businessman Carlos Slim in return for a cash infusion. But the credit rating agencies still cut the rating on Times Company's debt to junk status, and the cash crunch at The Times prompted it to threaten to shutter its Boston Globe unless workers made deep concessions.
|
From Poynter.org:
Quote:
In the first quarter of 2012, Washington Post print advertising declined 17 percent from the same period in 2011. Circulation fell 9.8 percent daily and 5.2 percent Sunday.
But the bigger disappointment was that digital publishing revenues (including Slate) had decreased 7 percent in a year.
All those totals were among the worst in the industry, as they had been in the second half of 2011. But in the industry too, digital revenue growth had slowed in the first quarter of this year to 1 percent after growing by nearly 11 percent in 2010 and 7 percent in 2011.
I am told that April was another bad month for ad results at the Post and May and June mediocre ones — also typical for the industry.
As is customary for the Post, no detailed explanation has been forthcoming for the poor ad results or how, when and whether they can be fixed. Top executives also declined to respond on the record to details of the negative articles
|
The Post has been consistently losing money but the company has covered up those losses with gains from Kaplan (a university largely funded by Federal Student loans). But the government has been cracking down on the unsavory practices Kaplan employed and now they're losing money too.
Ironically, the WSJ is thriving. If you read it you'll understand why- the bias is kept on the editorial page and it is extraordinarily rich in useful and interesting information. Today the paper featured an article on an AA gate agent who provides extraordinary service, how Europe's financial crisis is hurting company profits, how Russians sought to enlist children in spy rings, the drought in India, the snow melt in Greenland, Syrian defectors etc. etc.
The Post and Times focus almost exclusively on domestic politics and every section reeks of political bias. Even the Sports section. In contrast to the Post, whose automotive editor thinks a Porsche Turbo has eight cylinders, the WSJ has written numerous articles on F1, has an automotive editor who's pretty darned good and now features a Saturday section with good recipes, book reviews etc.