Virginian Pilot Begins Charging for Digital Access - A Step Toward Suicide

Virginian Pilot publisher David Mele

Writing a blog and being contacted by would be advertisers I know one thing:  to get paid for advertising online, the number of page views a blog or publication receives determines advertising rates and ultimately long term viability if making money is the main motivation.  The folks at the Virginian Pilot don't seem to get this reality and/or suffer from the delusion that they are in the same league as the New York Times (10 free articles a month) or Washington Post (20 free article a month).  Hence, going forward, Pilot online readers will get only 10 free articles a month.  

The Daily Press was even more draconian and allowed no free articles.  The result?  I don't even bother to look at the Daily Press and don't link to it at all anymore.  The Daily Press was always an inferior paper, and since sifting to charging for online access there has been a parallel further decline in its content.  Hence, the boyfriend and I dropped our 3 day a week print subscription.  The Daily Press frankly seems headed toward extinction.  The Virginian Pilot seems headed for a similar fate in my view.  Readers should expect a marked drop in this blog's references to and links to the Virginian Pilot.  I hope that helps decrease its page views.  Here's the Pilot's bullshit reasoning:

Our next change begins today, as we implement a new membership model which will require subscriptions for unlimited access to our journalism and content online.

Current subscribers to The Virginian-Pilot will receive membership and full access to our digital content as part of their existing subscriptions, at no additional charge.

For nonsubscribers, we will allow some sampling of our content on a monthly basis, with a system that will require membership to gain access to our digital content after 10 articles are read. Some sections of our websites will remain freely available, including home pages, obituaries, and online marketplaces for jobs, autos, and real estate.

There are plenty of free news outlets where one can find better quality coverage.  Truth be told, the Pilot only cares about selling advertising.  Quality journalism has always been a secondary concern.  Online traffic will seek these out and one can hope that the Virginian Pilot meets the end it deserves as readership declines further and advertisers balk at paying for inferior coverage.

Is Cumulus Looking to Dump Rush Limbaugh?

Rush Limbaugh has become increasingly crude and down right hateful in many of his rants.  And advertisers seem to be catching on that attaching their brand to Limbaugh may not be in the best interests of product sales to the larger consumer base even if the spittle flecked, racist conspiracy crowd that makes up Limbaugh's core listeners still are enthralled by his crudeness and bigotry.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at what may be an effort by Limbaugh's syndication to dump him.  Obviously, such a put down for Limbaugh would be all too delicious.  Here are some article highlights:

“We've had a tough go of it this last year,” Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey said Tuesday morning. “The facts are indisputable regarding the impact certain things have had on ad dollars."

Dickey told analysts on the earnings call that his radio empire’s revenue was down $5.6 million in the first quarter of 2013 on top of a boatload of debt. Why? Parse the weasel words (“the impact of certain things”) and you’ll see that Dickey is blaming one man for the precipitous decline of right-wing talk radio’s profitability: Rush Limbaugh. 

El Rushbo is still a giant in the industry, but the impact of slamming Sandra Fluke on his radio show one year ago persists—with some $2.4 million in losses attributed by Dickey to declines in the “syndicated-talk segment.”

Insiders confirm that these declines are primarily due to the ongoing reluctance of national advertisers to attach their name to the toxic talk-radio format that first made Limbaugh famous a generation ago. 

“We’re watching the end of right-wing conservative talk radio,” says Jerry Del Colliano, publisher of the radio-industry tip sheet Inside Music Media. “The genre is dying among ratings and dying among advertisers ... Rush is at the end of his career. His constituency is all wearing Depends. And he’s getting himself into trouble he doesn’t need. So can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? They have been able to improve their advertising picture, but they have not been able to come back.”

“Sandra Fluke was simply the lightning that struck and hit an old building that collapsed,” Colliano says. “She didn’t do it. She helped to bring it down at the end, but it was falling apart on its own.”

He [Limbaugh]  then doubled down on the attack in unusually creepy terms:

“If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is: we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."

The blowback was immediate. Elected Republicans, usually loathe to offend the influential talker, distanced themselves from his comments. But more powerful was the boycott that ensued, with 98 advertisers pulling their support for the show. 

The numbers announced on Tuesday made clear the impact of the boycott. Rush's comments on Fluke came on Feb 29, leap day of last year, so the Cumulus numbers offer an apples-to-apples comparison: pre-Fluke and post-Fluke. While some advertisters have come back, the show has been unable to regain its footing, and the impact has spread across right-wing talk radio as advertisers have became increasingly gun-shy about association with the genre.

But the larger issue is the declining demographics of the right-wing talk-radio racket.  “Look at the millennial generation,” says Colliano. “There’s 80 million of them coming of age. They don’t see color. They don’t see gender. And they’re civic minded: they don’t like bloviating. They don’t like yelling and screaming. So you tell me: how’s right-wing talk radio working for them?”

Now we need to see the same phenomenon hit Fox News, a/k/a Faux News.