According to the fossil-fuel funded loss making Guardian:
Marie Claire is just the latest titan of women’s media to fall, following Lucky, More!, The Pool and Lenny Letter.
It goes on to say:
we are mourning the UK print edition of Marie Claire, which at 31 has had its life cut short by the prolific killer, “social media”. Its other victims include Lucky, More!, Look and InStyle UK
…
It is an epidemic. Cosmopolitan saw its print circulation drop by a third in the last half of 2018; weeklies Woman and Woman’s Own were down 20% and 19% respectively. Now magazine dropped 43%.
What is perhaps most interesting here, given I’ve oft cited the decline of the press due to social media and the resultant move to extremism and fake news reporting of the remaining runts, is that Marie Claire started 31 years ago. This echoes the wholesale change that occurred at that time at the media was automated. This led to the notorious episode in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch took on the print unions and moved his entire British print works to Wapping in London’s Docklands, computerising the production process.
Thus Marie Claire was born out of a change in information communication technology in the print industry and it dies as a result of another change in information communication and the internet.
However, as intriguing is the delay. The internet started to become widespread in use by 2000, social media sites started appearing around 2003 but only really took off 2005-2010. So why didn’t Marie Claire collapse at that point? The reason must be that there is a delay between changes in information communication technology and people shifting their habits.
Another factor is that successful media usually have enormous piles of cash or at least investors with deep pockets and having been successful they normally expect to be able to find a way to be successful in the future. And, it’s not until the funds start running dry that reality finally sinks home. And for example in the case of the Guardian, which had a massive fossil-fuel funded best egg from selling of auto-trader, last time I looked it could easily afford to keep losing £100million a year pushing out its fake-news propaganda for a decade.
But such slushy funding eventually comes to an end, and sooner or later all the media has to start earning its living or close.
But what is really interesting is the Guardian perception that these magazines were all going “woke”. Or to put it in a very obvious way … in the internet filled to the brim with woke anti-profit websites, these magazine companies, trying to make a profit, were all moving to cater for the end of the market that has absolutely no need to pay to hear its preferred political views being echoed back to it.
Clearly, the perception of the media is that people are becoming “woke” and anti-capitalist, but that surely is because these views are the ones that are liberally spread across the internet without a thought for profit? People who are driven by profit, don’t waste their time pushing their views on the internet! So, surely there must be a massive market of people who are driven by the profit motive who just can’t find many people sharing their interests on the free-to-read internet?
This is I think what I’m starting to detect. The media going on a wild-goose chase, becoming more and more woke chasing a public it wrongly thinks is becoming more and more woke because of the distorted echo-box in which the media live.
To use another analogy, the internet is the self-service supermarket of almost free news. Anyone trying to compete in that self-service market needs to stack em high and sell em cheap and even then is likely to go broke (as only the biggest will survive). In contrast, if you want to make a profit, then you need to focus on serving the customer and providing a service which is missing in the self-serve world on free-news.
And by “service”, what it means is working out what the customer wants to read and then making that available in “their size”. The news is the same – what is different is that the news is tailored to the customer. That however, is where all the media are failing. The old model of the media was that journalists wrote what they wanted to write, and then customers either accepted it or went elsewhere. That’s not service, that’s a dinner lady sloshing cabbage on a plate and saying “take it or leave it”.
The media echo box
Recently I’ve noticed an increasingly distorted echo-box of news. An obvious example was the way the MPs who have been trying to stop the implementation of the democratic will of the people expressed at the referendum vote to leave the EU … were proclaimed as “stopping a coup”, when they were the ones trying to overthrow democracy. This is when the majority of the British public voted to leave – that majority which that same media labelled as bigots, racists and xenophiles for simply wanting to hire and fire those who govern us.
The precise issue is less important than the way, this distorted concept so quickly gained hold. And it is not alone. What is even more insane is that after one of the longest sessions of parliament Scottish judges with no jurisdiction over UK affairs, without hearing from the PM, decided they knew what was in his mind and because they “knew” he intended to start a new session in order to ensure the democratic decision to leave the EU occurred, he was acting “illegally”. THEY ARE BONKERS!
A similar one is the “climate emergency”, when any reasonable assessment of the evidence shows nothing of the sort. Another was the vicious lynch-mob attacks by media and judges on Tommy Robinson for standing up against the grooming gangs that operated in his community. I am seeing more and more of these echo-chamber delusional campaigns where not only the media form a lynch mob, but even judges & the speaker of parliament (presumably only getting their news from the media lynch mob) and cheering them on.
These delusional episodes of the old press seem to be increasing as fewer and fewer people read the old media. So, it seems that as fewer and fewer people read the old style media, that this is in some way causing the old media to become increasingly subject to delusional lynch-mob mentality (or Trump derangement syndrome as it is called in the US) which is even sucking in supposedly impartial judges, FBI, etc.
Witch Trials
From a historical point of view, I find this delusional behaviour of those still reading the old media to be fascinating. It is after all not unique to the present period. We saw pretty much the same behaviour after the print revolution, presumably fuelled by the new style “Bloggers” with their books on witchcraft. But it also has echoes of the behaviour seen in Nazi Germany and indeed almost every fascist regime whether on the left or right.
I don’t understand why it is happening, but it may be linked to what I said before. The world is increasingly becoming divided between two extremes: the groupthinkers, who take their views from those they ascribe as having “authority” and the individualists, who are usually far from keen to blithely accept another’s view whoever they are. At one end they are fascists forcing conformity, even if that conformity is dressed in the clothes of “diversity”. At the other they are libertarians willing to listen to others and do their own research before forming their own views. They value diversity in the real sense of diversity of views, even of those who dogmatically try to enforce fascist conformity.
So, it seems to me the delusional “media lynch mobs” are part of the fascist group-think mentality, or at least it is the group-think mentality that allows them to grow and flourish.
Is this a phenomenon of a dying breed of old-media? Is it a part of the re-alignment process whereby society adapts to the change in power of different groups brought about by social media? Or, is it that the group-thinkers are faster on the uptake of the new media? So, this lynch mob echo-box mentality that I’m increasingly seeing is a disparity in the rate of which the two ends of the political spectrum are making use of the internet?
I don’t know why the old media are increasingly delusional, indeed perhaps they’ve always been this nutty and it’s just that “coming up for air” from the dungheap I can smell the shit. I don’t know whether their delusion is a passing fad or something that will go on or on. Nor do I really know whether it is still getting worse or whether it is reducing. But they are delusional, and it is concerning.
