Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Listening To Your Customers And Improving Your Product Just Might Be Crazy Enough To Work.

Sez John Hinderaker:

As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the industry's current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency, which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider: stop being so liberal. Wouldn't you think that with newspapers nearly everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether its readers--or former readers--were trying to tell it something? Like, we're not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?

But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the Democratic Party.

Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial bleeding? It's hard to say for sure. But don't you think that if they were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal papers might try it?

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