Cuts at Gazette “bad for English news”
CBC has a piece on how cuts at the Gazette are bad for English news, and they speak to editors of smaller papers. It’s telling that one of the editors admits her readership is all elderly. It’s also telling that Gazette editor Bert Archer wasn’t talking about the situation.
Ephraim 11:27 on 2023-01-31 Permalink
Traditional media is all elderly. A few months ago, Variety printed an article https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the-cw-age-average-viewer-broadcast-1235342962/ about the average age of viewers for live TV. The CW, which aims at the youngest audience had an average age of viewership of 57.
Personally, I haven’t bought a paper newspaper in well over a decade, maybe 2 by now. I haven’t bought a magazine is about that long (other than when I bought some for my late mother to read at the hospital and it was hard to even find a store that carried them anymore) and I don’t usually even watch the TV news anymore.
It’s unfortunately, oddly enough, it isn’t the newspapers which really do the digging anymore. It’s the local TV news and as they cut it corporately and centralize news, we get less and less of the local stuff, which is what made people watch in the first place
Blork 11:50 on 2023-01-31 Permalink
It doesn’t help that the web versions of corporate news sites like the Gazette and CTV provide such awful user experiences, as has been noted here several times.
The amount of advertising is almost unbearable, but what’s worse is the auto-playing video that follows even after you scroll past it, and the text jumping every few seconds as ads refresh and their container sizes change, plus all those shitty clickbait programmatic ads at the bottom, which degrade the site’s brand and seriousness (as far as I’m concerned).
Also, corporate media sites are usually not very searchable and have terrible archiving. It’s as if they’re still locked into the old newspaper way of thinking that “today’s news is all that matters; leave the archiving up to the librarians!”
No vision at all, other than “get as many ad impressions as possible!” It feels like they are run entirely by end-of-career general managers who went back to school for a year in 1998 to upgrade their “information superhighway” skills and haven’t looked forward since.
Kevin 12:11 on 2023-01-31 Permalink
I enjoyed this Twitter thread although I disagree with part of it: https://twitter.com/richardwarnica/status/1618623883845996546
One problem is that companies that used to spend money on local advertising now give it all to a couple of massive international behemoths. A second is that there is widespread fraud in digital advertising so that companies never really know where their ads are appearing, or even if they are being seen by actual humans.
shawn 14:46 on 2023-01-31 Permalink
I’ve currently been on hold with Postmedia for an hour trying to update my Gazette payment and account info. Not to cancel-just update. Automated callback not working either. Everything just seems to be hollowed out, there.