Yes, I plead guilty to telescoping, which is similar to your crime of telegraphing, but emphatically not identical. You have been economical with words, I have been cavalier about laying down the links between different propositions in a logical chain. This would have freaked out a teacher of formal logic; fortunately, all of them are safely housed nowadays, with kind men and women dressed in impeccable, starched white jackets ensuring that they don't dribble.
I note your largely agreeing with me. It seems that you are willing to accept that there
may be faint rays of hope in the prevailing gloom, an occasional green shoot somewhere, in stark contrast to my pessimism - or was it my deplorable excess of missionary zeal? I wasn't quite sure which category you had popped me into.
Time to beat down these flickers of hope.
Very briefly, while the overt aim is to 're-position' TIME magazine, the covert one is stated clearly, almost too clearly to make it covert - that of reaching a different cross-section of readership, thereby attracting a different level of advertising.
Let's take a look at what happens next. Advertisers (other than some hypothetical constructs who have read C. K. Prahlad) like to advertise to big spenders, the heavy hitters. So what are they trying to do? How about edge closer to The Economist in terms of marketing strategy? Get the readership profile further up the economic ladder?
Does the news-stand or subscription price matter? No, not really. It gets subsidised the more the advertising support increases. Now look where we are. By aiming for a richer audience, we can actually lower the price. The others, who have lost out to this positioning, are more heavily dependent on news-stand and subscription pricing, hence that is less subsidised, hence their readers pay more. So we land up paying less for rich content, paying more for dumb content, and we also land up pushing the rich stuff at the well-off, while the dumbed down content goes to the less affluent.
So where are we on our own little private argument?
- '...not every improvement in the status quo needs to save the world
in order to be recognised...':
Is it an improvement? I thought rather the reverse. Of course, it depends on your point of view. If you are the lucky one getting the more diversified news that you want, at a lower price, because some other guys/dames might just buy a Bentley after reading its ad, it's an improvement. - '...the MSM, as exemplified by _Time_, is re-jiggering its content
(*not* its pricing. Not that I can make out, anyway.) to better suit
the demographic that advertisers will pay more for...':
I tried to answer that one, albeit at some yawn-inducing length. - '...both the improvement in terms of content, as well as your comment
about how the gap is widening, are emergent phenomena, and not the
objective of the move...':
Hmm. I thought the whole point I tried to make was that the improvement, associated with pricing rather than a decision to write better for the sake of writing better, and associated with decisions about the level and quality of material that people should read at different income levels, are decisions, taken by myriad, nameless individuals, but taken on moral and political bases which lead to a rather predictable conclusion. And that is to widen the gap.
And as young-fella-me-lad Srini pointed out, if you and I weren't rich (=time to spare on our hands), we would be queuing up at the ration shop, or digging ditches at a Food For Work programme, or something equally Stakhanovite in character, rather than punching keys at each other.
PS: And what the dickens do you mean 'Indrajit Gupta wrote'? I am bonobashi, and I like it that way, thank_you_very_much.
Udhay Shankar N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Indrajit Gupta wrote: [ on 01:03 PM 9/30/2006 ]
>The cumulative result is that the rich are insulated from what the
>rest go through; in headlines language, we are rich and we can do
>what we want.
Without taking away from the argument above (which I largely agree
with) - my point, which was probably too telegraphically put, was
that not every improvement in the status quo needs to save the world
in order to be recognised.
Your initial response was
>Sorry, did I miss something? It seems that this is the reverse of
>heartening news.
to the article that Kiran forwarded, which basically made the point
that the MSM, as exemplified by _Time_, is re-jiggering its content
(*not* its pricing. Not that I can make out, anyway.) to better suit
the demographic that advertisers will pay more for.
Both the improvement in terms of content, as well as your comment
about how the gap is widening, are emergent phenomena, and not the
objective of the move.
Udhay
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Indrajit Gupta
'Ramsharan', 396, TT Krishnamachari Road,
Teynampet,
Chennai 600 018.
+914455511138
+919884375777
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