The business model for traditional media outlets like the
The New York TImes and
The Washington Post has been fragile for years. The next four years adds this additional challenge of a bully President who is
tweeting about "the very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the Trump phenomena." This is from a man who famously wrote in
The Art of the Deal: "The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business." He also wrote:
Outlets like The
New York Times and
The Washington Post have to do what they have done forever: keep us all informed with excellent thorough reporting. (How to get people away from the
terrors of "fake news" is a different issue.) And I'll say the obvious to myself and to everyone else: we have to read these pieces, whatever the message.
The Washington Post is offering
6 months of free coverage for Amazon Prime subscribers and an unlimited digital subscription for
.EDU, .GOV, or .MIL email addresses. That's great! Thanks Jeff Bezos! But if we want these outlets to do what they are doing, we need to subscribe to media outlets that are doing their job. The industry is stable for now, but we all know that it is a
financially precarious industry -- and an extremely precarious institution in other ways as a result of what happened this week.
