The mergers that could kill your local paper and blow up your streaming bill
Isabelle Roughol
Building news organisations where people love to work｜Journalist & media executive｜Public historian
Is the Gannett-Gatehouse merger good or bad for local journalism?
Probably bad. The two biggest newspaper chains in the US are combining, they're going to own one in six newspapers in America. The problem is we're not seeing much a strategy here, it's mostly a financial deal. And an expensive one at that, so there will be a lot of pressure to cut costs. They're looking to save about $300 million annually. That means layoffs. That means centralizing some functions like ad sales, design or editing; consolidating regionally, possibly selling off some newspapers or selling off real estate... (and, I forgot to mention, foregoing daily and getting rid of some print days, another popular option). The problem is a lot of these things have already happened to American newspapers, and more than once, so you're really getting blood out of a stone at this point. It's not good news for the communities they cover or for the people who work there.
If you want to dig further into this merger and the larger story of local news' dire economics, check out Ken Doctor's excellent reporting at Newsonomics.
What does the CBS Viacom merger mean for consumers?
Ultimately, it's going to further divide up the content you love across multiple platforms. The streaming war is on: CBS and Viacom felt they had to merge in order to stand up to the bigger players in the game like Disney, Netflix, Amazon... Viacom was so far quite happy to put their content on whatever platform would have them (as CEO Bob Bakish told LinkedIn earlier this year); that's probably going to change. For you it means you have to get more subscriptions and pay more to see all the shows that you love – the Star Trek franchise in this case. Unfortunately, you're looking at more expensive bills, just like in the days of cable.
Is your streaming bill ballooning? How do you choose which ones to opt into – or out of? Are you concerned for your local paper? Share in the comments.
A fond farewell and thank you to Media in 60 producer Adam Pourahmadi on his last episode. We're taking a short break and will be back in September. Follow GZero Media to catch this and other In 60 Seconds series.
Strategy development, leadership and data driven business improvement.
5 年Lets face it, most local papers are already dead. My local paper is written over 100 miles away, uses google street view instead of real photography, writers have little understanding of the area they write about and headlines have turned into click bait to feed their pages of adverts, separated only by a few lines of non-story.
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5 年Streaming Hack / Pro Tip: - instead of paying to stream a channel month after month, just but the show on DVD when it comes out. Way cheaper and you own it. We stick to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Beyond that we just buy a season on DVD. You can resell them after you watch if you they are expensive / high demand. You can also rent through Amazons app - you dont need 10 subscriptions. We have 5 girls, so buying Disney movies on garage sales makes sense - take that saved money and just watch it in the theater here or there - more fun anyways :)
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5 年Media consolidation is nothing new. I don’t think anyone reads my local paper except the people that still run ads in there. My streaming bill (Netflix) is getting cut because I just don’t see the value in it anymore
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5 年There is a right move here - stop subscribing to streaming services and read books and work out instead - higher enjoyment and return. If we all cut our entertainment time by 50% by 2050, our civilization might still?be around by 2100