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NZ writedowns hurt APN's profit - NZ Herald: New Zealand Business, Markets, Currency and Personal Finance News - NZ Herald News
Earlier this week Fairfax Media announced an A$447.5 million writedown in the value of its mastheads. Including the writedown, the company made a loss of A$365.3 million for the six months.
More on Nonprofit Newspapers: Think Tank: Online Only: The New Yorker
An endowed newsroom should hire young journalists, innovate, and adapt to the changing media market while preserving the core values, ethics, and reporting sensibilities of the past. If that means letting lifestyle or business journalism go on the grounds that the commercial market is handling it well enough, then fine, as long as the audience doesn’t run away, too.
Still, the big papers have some unique properties, which will likely become extinct unless their newsrooms are protected with endowments. These include their audiences, their scale, their reporting, and the nature of the talent they develop over long careers.
The sad irony of the predicaments facing newspapers today is that their troubles are not a function of loss of audience. In fact, the total readership of the content of the New York Times and the Washington Post has grown more than fivefold since the emergence of the World Wide Web. My statistics are not up to date, but the Washington Post and New York Times Web sites combined have in excess of twenty-five million unique monthly users. Several million of these readers live overseas. The problem is that the business model that created the newsrooms that made this journalism so popular has been shattered at the same time. New readers are, per capita, less profitable than the old ones. That is hardly a reason to allow the destruction of the journalism that attracted them to these newsrooms in the first place.
Second, the sheer scale of legacy newsrooms creates strength—an independence of mind, an imperviousness to deep pockets and political pressure. At the height of the Washington Post’s powers, I was working as an investigative reporter in London and got into a dispute over my reporting with an exiled Russian, er, businessman. The Post’s lawyers never blinked. They shelled out in the range of a million bucks of cash and insurance to defend our reporting, sent private investigators to Russia to acquire files that proved our case, and handled the matter without ever breaking a sweat. The powerful
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