I am told I am supposed to be saddened by the news that The New York Daily News has laid off half of its newsroom staff, including all photographers, due to continued losses of revenue. This could not have been more predictable. Those who lost their jobs should have seen the writing on the wall as recently as 2017, when the company was sold to its present owners for a grand total of one dollar. In other words, you could have bought the entire Daily News for fifty cents less than you could today buy a copy of The Daily News, though you’d have been on the hook for millions in pension and operating debt. So really, the company was worth far less than nothing.
You would think that a paper in such dire circumstances would try to figure out how to attract new customers. But the paper, which had become stridently, and even violently anti-Republican in the years leading up to the sale, only increased its reputation as a no-go zone for anyone even slightly right of center. It’s almost as though they would rather go out of business than sell even a single edition to a Republican. Well congratulations, they’re going to get their wish.
It’s not just that they routinely and reflexively take far left stands on everything (when nobody asked them to!), it’s that they have made it their entire business model to demonize and ridicule Republicans, and middle America as a whole. See for yourself! Do a quick Google search for “NY Daily News Donald Trump Covers”, click “Images”, and you should see covers with the following captions:
- Clown Runs For President
- Dawn of the Brain Dead
- I’m With Stupid
- I’m With Racist
- I’m With Perv
- Lock Him Up!
- Not Too Bright
- Confederacy of Dunces
- Dead Clown Walking
- Bury Trump In A Landslide
- ANTI-CHRIST!
- Evil
- Is N.H. Smarter than THIS 5th Grader?
- G.I. Joke
- Grab a Seat, Loser!
- Womb Raider
- Blood Money
- S**T For Brains (in front of a poop emoji with a blonde wig)
You should also find a not-too-subtle one showing a nuclear mushroom cloud, with President Trump’s face ghosted behind it, and the caption “Don unfit to be Prez.”
And another, celebrating President Trump’s victory by showing the White House behind an inverted American flag, and the caption “House of Horrors.”
And a more recent one, in the wake of Justice Anthony Kennedy announcing his resignation from the Supreme Court, which declared simply “We Are F*#%’D”
It does not show the cover from just two weeks ago, when The Daily News accused Trump of “treason”, even though he’s the first president in memory to actually defend our borders, care about other countries taking advantage of us, and stand up for the American worker, who for decades saw his jobs going overseas and his standard of living declining, as the American government took care of everyone else at their expense.
You could go on with this. There’s the cover following the San Bernardino shootings in 2015 that says “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS”, and the one telling Ted Cruz to “Drop Dead,” with a drawing of the Statue of Liberty giving Ted the finger, and too many others to count.
And they wonder why they have no readers? Here’s an idea: maybe constantly going out of your way to piss off half the country, while deliberately appealing only to a small number of elites and a large number of inerudites, is not the best business model for a newspaper.
If I ran my business by deliberately excluding large populations of customers, I would be out of business pretty quickly. Businesses go out of their way not to offend people for exactly that reason. But these guys are more concerned with voicing their own opinions than giving voice to the readers. That’s why they’re suffering.
And I could show you many other papers just like that. New Jersey’s leading rag, the Star Ledger, regularly runs front-page stories by their socialist propagandist Tom Moran, and their editorial board is reflexively pro-abortion and anti-Second Amendment — not just disagreeing, but outright vilifying opponents as hating women, being racists (how original!), and being personally responsible every time some gangbanger kills someone else — and they can’t figure out why they’ve lost forty percent of their circulation, can’t turn a profit, and had to lay people off.
One of the writers at the Star Ledger insisted to me (repeatedly) that I do not know what I’m talking about, and that the real problem is not reduced readership, but loss of advertising revenue to Internet competitors (as though the Star Ledger does not have its own website). Well, as someone who spent $100,000 on advertising last year alone, I’d like to think I know a little something about that, and — newsflash — when you lose forty percent of your circulation, advertisers like me are not going to be as interested in paying for space in your paper. To suggest that such a reduction in reach has no impact on your ability to attract advertisers is absurd. Plus, consider that the Star Ledger sells for $1.50 per copy (and about twice that on Sundays), so the 70,000 fewer papers that they sell daily costs them about $40 million per year, with which they could have paid $200,000 in salary and benefits to each of the 200 workers they had to lay off a few years ago.
But what do I know? My business is actually profitable, so obviously I am not nearly as knowledgeable in the science of failure as these guys. Maybe they can give me some lessons in that.
Look, it’s one thing for me to run a free blog in my spare time just for fun, and give away free content — which, by the way, is of much higher quality than anything The Daily News or Star Ledger is excreting — but if you’re trying to sell a product, maybe you might consider a bit of balance on occasion. So, while I feel bad for the families of the people who lost their jobs, a) they had plenty of notice this was coming, b) it really doesn’t bother me when an elitist institution-turned-tabloid gives way to more populist forms of media, and c) it is hard not to observe that the only people having difficulty finding work and keeping it in today’s America are liberal ideologues.
