In retrospect, it’s apparent that the commercial liability of newspapers and national magazines was the same as their cultural strength: they addressed issues of general interest in an all-purpose public sphere. But to advertisers this civics-class “everybody” was a consumer “nobody”: it meant the press didn’t know who its audience was, or what they could afford. To pack a reporter off to Congo or Pakistan was to spend a lot of money catering to a phantom demographic. When this was the best that advertisers could do, it’s what they did: if Macy’s was holding a sale, it advertised it in the front section of the paper between news of the defense of Kinshasa and the latest scandal in Congress, figuring that “everybody” saw it, one way or another.
Das nplusonemag befasst sich mit der Frage What’s Killing the New York Times? und beschreibt das Digitale Dilemma, vor dem Zeitungen und Magazine stehen, beschreibt die Werbe-Problematik, das Thema Paid Content und kommt zu dem Schluss:
Newspapers and magazines (including the Times) say they’re going to start charging for online content, but the most likely way they’ll survive is by capitalizing on their tony readership.
