How did Chris Christie, New Jersey's high profile Bushite former United States Attorney, who has already raised 3 million dollars, and who was supposed to be a shoe in for the Republican nomination for governor, suddenly find himself on the defensive against Steve Lonegan, the little known right-wing populist ex-mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, a town of only 8,000 people?
According to Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News and Democracy Now, as many as 12,000 journalists have lost their jobs over the past two years.
This includes the staff of Denver’s The Rocky Mountain News, which shut down completely on March 17th, 2009, the McClatchy chain, which has cut its national workforce by 1600 people beginning on March 21st 2009, and the Los Angeles Times, which fired 300 of its employees on February 1st 2009. Major newspapers like the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor have ceased their print editions altogether, and have transformed themselves into web only publications. The fate of the Boston Globe is still in limbo.
In the early stages of the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race, we are beginning to see the results.
How did Chris Christie, New Jersey’s high profile Bushite former United States Attorney, who has already raised 3 million dollars, and who was supposed to be a shoe in for the Republican nomination for governor, suddenly find himself on the defensive against Steve Lonegan, the little known right-wing populist ex-mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, a town of only 8,000 people?
The answer is at least partly nj.com, New Jersey’s Conde Nast built online news aggregator.
On October 24th, 2008, the Star Ledger, New Jersey’s venerable daily newspaper, gutted its newsroom, cutting its staff by 40%.
Unlike the Rocky Mountain News, which shut down completely, or the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which has begun to thrive as a web only publication, the Star Ledger seems to have done a little of both.
According to Editor and Publisher, the Star Ledger’s circulation has dropped 16.82% over the past 6 months ending in March of 2009. While its methodology may not be completely reliable, it’s also striking to notice that according to Alexa.com, nj.com, the state wide news aggregator of which the online edition of the Star Ledger is the most important part, has had a 15.5% increase in traffic over the past 3 months ending this May.
But even if the transfer of readership from the print edition to the Star Ledger to the online aggregator of all of New Jersey’s major newspapers, nj.com, is not quite so neat and symmetrical, there’s no denying that an increasingly large percentage of Americans are getting more and more of their news online and less via a print edition of a daily newspaper.
It is possible to transfer a newspaper almost intact from print to the web.
The Seattle Post Intelligencer seems to have done just that. A brief glance at its front page shows a top column functioning as a sort of "front page." Featured stories seem to be chosen by the papers editors, not its readers. The advertisements are on the right, and below there is a "Local News" section, a "Business/Tech" section, a "Sports" and an "Arts and Entertainment" section. The online edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer feels likes a staid, digital broadsheet, the old Seattle Post Intelligencer with a more efficient system of delivery.
Nj.com, on the other hand, feels like a loud, vulgar digital tabloid.
Instead of a relatively static section devoted to featured stories chosen by trained journalists, there is, on the upper left hand side of the website, something called "Real Time News," an RSS feed which sends a fast moving stream of news bits not only from the New Jersey newspapers aggregated under nj.com and AP articles, but also from other newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, opinion pieces, fluff entertainment pieces, and brief squalid nuggets from the police blotter. Stories that are placed in the center column and stay there are stories that receive the most comments.
It is, therefore, a very easy system to "game."
At nj.com a small, but very fanatical group of right wing extremists make sure that inner city crime stories, negative stories about the Democratic party, immigrant bashing, and campaign propaganda for the Republican Party are constantly on what is the digital equivalent of New Jersey’s local "front page." In effect, the transition from the print media to the online media has, through the process of their delivery, hijacked the Star Ledger and the Asbury Park Press for the extreme right, taking two relatively staid broadsheets, remaking them as the local answer to Fox News or the New York Post, and making it all seem like democracy in action.
Thus, Steve Lonegan, who is probably best known for trying to remove a McDonald’s advertisement in Spanish from a local billboard, has already lost one run for Congress and came in a distance fourth in the 2005 Republican gubernatorial primary, suddenly finds himself a viable candidate in a state that Barack Obama took by 15%. Christie is already running attack ads against Lonegan and tacking far to the right, going so far, for example, to declare himself a "pro-life candidate." The Democrats, in turn, seem to be enjoying Lonegan’s strong early showing, hoping that he’ll be able to bloody Christie before the general election and, just perhaps, contribute to Jon Corzine getting the change at a second term.
But, like the Republicans in the spring of 2008, with their "Operation Chaos," the Democrats could be playing with fire. New Jersey, like the rest of the country, is a very angry place right now, and a recession coupled with a radically downsized and dumbed down corporate media, is a moist, wet breeding ground for a toxic right wing populist, and racist like Steve Lonegan.