From Yahoo News:
It was a bit of a moment for me.
The scene is early February 2017 and I’m chatting with Rupert Murdoch and Peter Thiel at a reception for chess grandmaster cum anti-Putinist, Garry Kasparov, at New York City’s hoary University Club.
Murdoch, garbled mouthed, asks me how things are. I assume he means my business life and so I tell him that Yahoo Finance is humming right along. Murdoch blinks and says nothing. Then Thiel pipes up. “Well,” he says in the sort of earnest way he has, “we are in a bull market for news.”
And a lightbulb went off in my head. Thiel was right, (leaving aside that Thiel is the man who shut down Gawker, and nevermind the polarization and carnage Murdoch has inflicted on our media and society), we were in a bull market for news. And it turned out the bull had room to run too, gathering steam over subsequent years and culminating in last year’s news frenzy. But just like any mania the salad days for the news business couldn’t last forever. And in fact didn’t.
It’s pretty obvious what happened, right? Trump is gone, (for now at least), not only from the White House but off Twitter and Facebook where every one of his posts merited coverage. There was also COVID-19, huge news unto itself, but the pandemic also meant that tens of millions were cooped up with nothing to do all day but stare at CNN or Fox. George Floyd’s murder, the ensuing protests and racial and social justice stories were huge. And finally there was the election, impeachment and the insurrection. The last time all that happened in the same year, (or ever), was never.
So yes the bull market in news is over, finito, kaput. Not forever of course but for now. Cable TV news ratings were mixed in Q1, but down significantly in March as the election faded into the rearview mirror. And growth slowed at the New York Times too, (more on that in a bit.) Meanwhile media columnists are running out of things to write about, except oh-so-predictable Twitter dust-ups (like the recent one at the AP), or the weekly internecine contretemps at the New York Times, which fewer and fewer people give a flying fruit bat about.
“The downturn should’ve been widely expected,” says Ed Moya, senior market analyst with OANDA. “The media is missing Trump who was the greatest show on every network. He was captivating, whether you loved him or hated him. He provided a steady stream of interesting news developments that are impacting the country or the economy.”
And now?
“Biden and his team are doing everything they can to make Biden as boring as possible,” says New York Times media columnist Ben Smith. “Last year there really was life and death stuff going on like COVID and would our country survive. That’s gone now. Who the hell wants to stay inside and read news now anyway?” (Note that Smith said this to me while we were chatting on a bench in Central Park on a lovely afternoon this week.)
Wall Street understands all this. You need to look no further than the New York Times’ stock chart. Two years ago, I wrote about the paper’s remarkable rise from a near death experience in 2009, when the company’s stock touched $3 and change. By the time I wrote that piece in February 2019, the stock was up almost 10X to the low $30s, having climbed 10 points in just two months that year. The run continued with (NYT) spiking to $58 this January, as the stock handily outperformed the S&P 500 over the past five years. That’s over now. Today the stock trades at $43, down 17% year-to-date, while the market is up 12%....
....MUCH MORE
