If there were any winners from Donald Trump’s first term as president, the New York Times has a strong claim to be one of them.
Subscriber numbers at the newspaper, which Trump repeatedly described as “failing”, surged from just under 3m to 7.5m over the course of the four-year administration as Left-leaning readers flocked to what they viewed as trusted news sources.
This “Trump bump”, as the phenomenon became known, also paid dividends for The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as broadcasters such as CNN.
Now, as Trump prepares to return to the White House, US media outlets are hoping to repeat the trick. But experts warn that the political and media backdrop has changed almost unrecognisably over the last eight years.
The experts are going to be wrong.
Because such experts always are of course.
But more interestingly what is really happening is that there’s an underlying structural change going on. As I’ve noted many times before the UK has had a national newspaper market for over a century now. The end result of which is a markt delineated not by geography but by class and politics. Titles chase a slice of the demography not the people in an area.
The US market, until the internet, was far more like the British local newspaper market than our national. Now, the internet is making it more like our national. The outcome will be – as I’ve been saying for a couple of decades – something like our national market.
The economics of that absence of distance any more just mean that is what is going to happen.
Wonder who’s going to have the gumption to be The Sun and Daily Mirror of this new world order?
I paid £3.50 for a print Telegraph on Christmas Eve. In the past such issues were full of extras and features, a bit like the weekend copies.
Terrible, thin and I haven’t even bothered to try the crossword.
The dead tree press is as doomed as a red shirted Star Trek extra.
The question is: who is going to be the US Rupert Murdock and create a US Sun. It was only when Rupe bought up a stuggling low-circulation broadsheet with delusions of middle-class radicalism and put BOOBIES on the inside page and chucked away half the pages that it took off. Soared away, as it were.
There are times when I think the purpose of the online safety bill is to create non-tariff barriers to bolster the traditional media of the country. I suspect the ruling class preferred it when there was just the national press to deal with.
@jgh
Won’t work today when tits (and all other bits) are freely available on demand to anyone with a phone.