Jeff Jarvis, who has (for better or worse) become something of a new media guru stalking the land of the old, caused a bit of a stir in my world when he posted last Saturday on the amazing success of the LA Times news web operation:

David Westphal reports an important and historic crossing of the Rubicon for a major newspaper, recounting a discussion with LA Times editor Russ Stanton at USC: “Stanton said the Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.”

His response?

So why not go ahead and turn off the presses and the trucks and turn the Times into a pure news enterprise, disaggregated from its production and distribution businesses?

That’s frankly breathtaking in its ignorance of the customers the Times is trying to serve. A million people a day (a million!) still fork over money to buy the print product. Those people are LA Times customers.

There are problems with the print product business model, to be sure. But for a supposedly smart business guru to suggest that a company abandon that many paying customers – as opposed to, say, figuring out how to continue selling them a product they seem to want? In what universe does that make any sense at all?

There are important lessons to learn from the LA Times on line success, but abandoning print is not one of them.

There’s a common confusion among “Netizens” about the reason for the mainstream news media’s demise – the notion that newspapers are in decline because they have not done their job of informing the public well enough. Paul Mulshine, reporting from Newark, offers a different explanation:

They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren’t doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they’re under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.

So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won’t be able to do it either.

(h/t Eric)

Ned Resnikoff with a message many of us in old media are good about hearing:

The journalist can no longer afford to keep his audience at a comfortable distance, or ignore the work of others covering the same topic.

An intriguing analysis by RIccardo Puglisi and James Snyder, published this month in NBER (gated), finds statistical evidence for a correlation between newspapers’ endorsement patterns (R vs. D) and the papers’ news coverage of scandals involving Republican and Democratic politicians:

[T]hose with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elec tions give significantly more coverage to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers behave in the opposite way. This bias in the coverage of scandals is not connected to the editorial page, but also affects the news section. While the fraction of stories devoted to political scandals is on average very small, the magnitude of the coverage bias effect is very large in relative terms: the differential coverage of Republican versus Democratic scandals by a newspaper with a propensity to endorse Democratic candidates which is one standard deviation higher would be larger by around 26 percent.