Big media likes to poke fun at little media.   But little media still turns a profit while big media is in a financial death spiral.   Big media is in no position to teach any business anything.   Instead they ought to look at profitable small media and see if they can learn anything from them.

Reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) show a continued significant decline in newspaper circ.   The print publishing business is run by the ABCs since publishers exstablish and justify their ad rates based on circ.   The New York Times suffers from declining circ as much as any paper.   They also suffer from reduced advertising revenues absent any decline in circ.   The confluence of the two is the death spiral for any print publication.   That's why, as we've pointed out many times before, the Times' stock trades narrowly near its five year low price point.

For this reason, I find it particularly humorous when the Times criticizes another media business for focusing their business and telling reporters no more global warming stories.   The piece published today in the Times takes note of the edict by the general manager of a local television station in Maine who told his news division that until Bar Harbor is underwater, they shouldn't do any global warming stories.   According to the Times, his reasons for this policy are: "a) we do local news, b) the issue evolved from hard science into hard politics and c) despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, this science is far from conclusive."

That pretty much sizes it up, don't you think?   Yet the Times apparently thinks this is funny or dangerous, I'm not sure which.   Perhaps more importantly, we have, on one hand, a small, profitable media business showing us how to focus one's editorial content.   On the other hand, we have a large, publicly traded, failing business which cannot learn new tricks even when it is a matter of survival, and is content to achieve the short-term political gain of criticizing conservatives and getting a Democrat Congress elected for two years.