The Washington Post Swallows Sleeping Pills, Then Calls 911
On the evening of March 27, I clicked a link to an article in The Washington Post. Within seconds, the page went blurry, and I got an ad asking me to pay for a subscription.
I then went to the home page. I could see the headlines for all of the articles, and all of the headlines were hotlinks. I clicked on several articles, and the same thing happened again. The article went blurry, and up popped an advertisement asking me to pay for a subscription.
I rejoiced. I saw this as the suicide of The Washington Post.
Approximately seven hours later, I was back online. I found a Washington Post story on Google News. I clicked through. Lo and behold, I could read it. It did not get blurry. No advertisement popped up asking me to pay for a subscription. What a shame! The marketing department had come to its senses. The Left-wing digital rag would survive.
Basically, somebody in marketing swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills. Then, probably watching a collapse of readership within hours, somebody in authority pulled back and called 911. The paramedics got there in time. Too bad.
The Left-wing media are desperate. They find that liberal readers will not pay for the Left-wing spin that the media provide.
The Los Angeles Times continues to block access to its articles. It demands that you subscribe. But nobody needs to read The Los Angeles Times. You can find articles on other sites that are up-to-date that cover the same topics, and you don't have to pay for them. Maybe there are a few local stories that you would like to read, but they are not life and death. You really don't have to read them. Meanwhile, for anything that applies to anything outside of Los Angeles or California politics, there is always some other newspaper website that is offering some version of the story that the Los Angeles Times is blocking. This is economic reality. There is nothing that editors and marketing departments can do about it.
Forbes tried blocking articles several months ago. The marketing department or somebody in authority pulled back from that suicidal policy. Now, you have to put up with a blurry page for maybe 20 seconds, but then it clears up. I don't understand it. When you see the blurry page, you don't get a pop-up that asks you to subscribe. You know the page will clear up in a few seconds, so you sit there, waiting to read the article. The whole procedure is annoying, and I doubt that it generates any money in subscriptions.
We are watching an entire industry caught in the tar pits. Like the mastodons they are, they ride around, trumpeting in desperation. But they are all sinking. They don't have a business model that works, and if they don't find one, they are going to lose money until they fire enough liberal reporters that revenue from click-throughs on ads will support the operations.
Economics is relentless. Unless you have a benefactor like Jeff Bezos, your employer is not going to stay in business. Red ink will eventually overcome hope. These people will have to find other occupations, and I doubt seriously that they will ever penetrate mass-market readership again. Their opinions will carry even less weight than they carry today, and they carry very little today.