BLUF: The media’s financial crisis is a result of the financialization of news media which weakened it, and the finance sector continues to bleed out the press, with waves of private equity debt-loading and rollups, and Big Tech stealing its money, yet levying a “link tax” is not the solution.
The article explains the root cause of media’s financial crisis, which is the result of consolidation, raised prices, firing reporters, firing locally focused salespeople, consolidation of classified and display ad-sales to national call-centers, and selling off and leasing back all that physical plant which exposed the papers to rent and inflation shocks. The financialization of news media has weakened it, and the finance sector continues to bleed out the press, with waves of private equity debt-loading and rollups that reduce great newsrooms that filled iconic Deco skyscrapers to a few underpaid reporters working out of a remote concrete blockhouse the size of a Chipotle. Big Tech is also stealing the media’s money through ad-tech taxes, app store taxes, and having to pay ransom money to reach your own subscribers, people who asked the platforms to show them everything you had to say, resulting in media companies getting paid less for the ads. However, the media companies’ own default solution, proposed in countries all over the world, including the “JCPA” bill in the USA, is to levy a “link tax” on tech platforms’ mentions of the news.