Newspaper Readers Bored by the Year's Biggest Scandal
In your shattered Thursday media column: The Guardian's circulation drops, the New York Press is dead(ish), media reporter job moves continue, and meta-aggregation is about as great as you'd think.
- Here's what is referred to as a "wake up call" for everyone in the media bubble: the circulation at The Guardian (UK) was actually down by 2.5% in July. Why does that matter? Because that's the month the paper was breaking the News Corp phone hacking scandal, the biggest story it's had in years. Let's be honest, if you don't work in the media, that was a somewhat boring story! The truth is, "news" does not get readers. Sex does. Sex sex sex, and violence. Rupert Murdoch is only sexy and violent in a very metaphysical sense.
- As rumored, the New York Press is being killed. In a way! Kat Stoeffel reports that the Press's parent company Manhattan Media is renaming the paper Our Town Downtown and morphing into a downtown Manhattan community paper, which is more up the alley of Manhattan Media than a true alt-weekly is. Which is why the NY Press was always a bad fit at its parent company. Too bad. If they'd had a better owner, they probably could have made some sort of a go at it. Perhaps it will be back, one day? Retro cool is cool.
- Media people are all getting new jobs now! Today, Capital NY (which just got a cash infusion) has hired media reporter Joe Pompeo away from Yahoo News. Also, Ad Age media reporter Edmund Lee is going to Bloomberg, to cover media! Wow with all these media job moves, whoever takes the bold step of hiring some "internet blogger" for a one million dollar salary sure will get lots of press. It would probably pay for itself, just saying.
- This is a blog post about a blog post about an aggregation of a story on crowdsourcing that was crowdsourced. None of it is worth your time.