Journalists need not apply: The Fall of the Union Tribune Newspaper

The following exerpts come from The AWL article:

What Became Of San Diego's Newspaper

Thomas Larson | January 18th, 2013

Plutocrats once courted positive press coverage with their advertising dollars. Now they buy the means of producing such coverage and produce it with themselves as headlines. The way a newspaper sells its products with less footwork than they did in days of yore is to become the news you cover.

To find how the self-interest of news works, we have only to listen to Lynch's crowing about his and Manchester's tendentiousness. In an interview with KPBS, he said that as owners, we "have the right to express our core values. We are pro-family, pro-military, and [have] pro-conservative business values. We believe those things have always fired the engine of development in San Diego and the entire country." His comments ring with evangelical conviction: "I don't know anybody who is not for those things." They also ring with a touch of McCarthyism. With the Associated Press, he changed the line to, "Anybody who isn't"—pro-family, pro-military, pro-conservative—"shouldn't be living here."

Manchester-style media has ushered in another new news tack—socializing the content. In TV and online formats, what is being delivered, in addition to the commercial-rich environment, is less about the news and more of what the source or personality who's delivering it thinks about the news—better yet, what the source or personality says about the news as he/she conveys it. It's talk radio applied to TV and streaming video.

Related:
• One Town, Two Newspapers: Will the Real Digital Innovators Please Stand Up?
• The Tiny Newspaper In North Carolina That Scooped Up Journalism's Big Prizes

"Newspaper as Business Pulpit," in The New York Times, and Joe Strupp's overview, "The Fall ofThe San Diego Union-Tribune," at Media Matters.