Subscription numbers are out for newspapers nationwide showing an average national decline in readership by 2.2%.  The L.A. Times did worst in the last year among the top ten papers, losing 5.4% of its subscribers in the past year and 17.9% in the last two years.  Looks like the LA Times is continuing to Manage Down, as discussed back in December here at Deep Keel.  Not so long ago they had solidly over a million subscribers and were looking to grow into other markets nationwide.  Now all they can seem to do is to keep firing enough people to maintain profitability as they hemorrhage subscribers year after year.  Clearly the management and workers have bought into the idea that it is an irreversible national trend and there is nothing that can be done but try to survive in whatever reduced role they end up at eventually.

Since they plainly refuse to admit the biased agenda journalism that has come to be the hallmark of their news reporting there really isn’t much else they can do.  The public in dribs and drabs experiences that eye opening moment when they realize just how bad the paper is because it finally covers something they know enough about to notice the bias and then cancels their accounts.  Simultaneously new media attract the majority of new potential customers, as young people just ignore the MSM products in much the same way they ignored all their similarly minded retrograde Hippie Flower Power Teachers in grade school.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  There are plenty of people who would love to buy a well written and researched newspaper they could trust to honestly present the news, and such a product would eventually appeal to younger folks when they grow up and get more serious.  But the L.A. Times is not that product.  What you can trust the L.A. Times to do is present you with biased news perspective based on filtered information picked to elicit political perspectives they agree with, and few stories on subjects or events that might bring people to come to other conclusions.  That sort of thing is free on the Internet.  Why pay them for predictable misinformation and opinions?  Look for the slide to continue unless a stockholder revolt forces some accountability.