Media Watch

Cape Cod Times as a Murdoch tabloid

Is the NewsCorp influence showing up in our local daily newspaper?
Will you or your grandma make it on page 3?

By Walter Brooks

Things must be  getting hairy in the ad department and newsroom at 319 Main Street Hyannis. Circulation at the Cape Cod Times is dropping along with the newspaper's advertising as the world (even Cape Cod) shifts to online media for the news.

The circulation numbers for the Cape Cod Times as of its ABC Publisher's Statement on 3/27/11:

• 37,522 Monday - Saturday
• 41,901 - Sunday

The circulation was near 65,000 twenty years ago.

The influence of the Times' new owner, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, may be seen in the newspaper's current request for photos of local bathing beauties.

Our Photoshopped version of a future Cape Cod Times front page on right is in the style of their London SUN sister publication, the pride of Murdoch's glitter rags. The raunchy model is an actual front page photo and the newspaper's online version goes full frontal nudity. We censored the woman's photo a bit.

The daily's editors cover themselves by asking for ancient bathing suit photos from our distant past as well as photos of readers "teeny with a bikini, tankini or (gasp!) a monokini?", but we all know how many grandmothers will send in an old black & whites pic.

It hard not to see where the editors got their idea given that the newspaper's owner is Rupert Murdoch and his London SUN infamous page 3 feature.

Despicable behavior by an arrogant old man
Murdoch closes his largest tabloid in wake of scandal, coming arrests of reporters

Murdoch's ethics are apparent today all over the media around the world as he supports his editors who abetted NewsCorp reporters hacking into the phones of murdered children and victims of the horrific London subway bombing.

  Follow live coverage here.
   Read the backstory here.

But today, the uproar grew so loud that with five of his journalists about to be arrested, Murdoch's UK headquarters, News International, announced it is shutting down the News of the World, the best-selling tabloid at the center of Britain's phone hacking scandal, and the 168-year-old weekly newspaper would publish its last edition on Sunday, without ads.

But don't think for a minute that Murdoch bowed to public decency and closed a money maker - the News of the World has been bleeding money fir three years as more and more people who were hacked illegally successfully sued the newspaper. Reuters reported today, "as allegations multiplied that its journalists hacked the voicemails of thousands of people, from child murder victims to the families of Britain's war dead, the tabloid hemorrhaged advertising, alienated millions of readers and posed a growing threat to Murdoch's hopes of buying broadcaster BSkyB."

How Did News of the World Hack Victims' Cell Phones? Read the PC magazine here.

The abrupt decision to shut the newspaper follows an extraordinary three days in which multiple revelations about intrusive phone hacking cost the paper its advertising base and reader support. The tabloid was found to have hacked into the phone message of a teenage murder victim and was suspected of possibly targeting the relatives of slain soldiers in its quest to produce attention-grabbing headlines.

Read the Yahoo News story here.

Most movies no longer advertise in Cape Cod Times

60 percent of our local movie screens missing from paper for a month now
The last Regal Cinema ad ran in Cape Cod Times on May 31

By Walter Brooks and staff

If you’re looking for show times at any of Cape Cod’s thirty movie screens owned by Regal Cinemas, don’t bother picking up the print edition of the Cape Cod Times because you won’t find them there any longer.  The last Regal Cinema ad ran in the local daily print edition on May 31^st. 

There are about fifty Cape movie screens listed on our free movie listing area here. Thirty of those screens are owned by Regal Cinemas of  Knoxville, TN which has a dozen locations in Massachusetts with half of them here on Cape Cod.

Perhaps the Harwich Lighthouse Cinema's first feature will be "The Fall of the House of Stewart."

I spoke with their marketing department and was told that it is now an industry trend to drop ads from the old media in favor of the internet which offers as good or better returns for less cost.

And Regal needs to save money because the company reported that total revenues for the first quarter ending March 31, 2011 were $570.9 million compared to total revenues of $719.8 million for the first quarter ended April 1, 2010. Net income (loss) attributable to controlling interest was $23.6 million in the first quarter of 2011 compared to $16.5 million in the first quarter of 2010. See the complete press release here.

Bad press for CC Times owner

Rupert Murdoch owns our local daily, and the Aussie tabloid publisher is engaged in the despicable habit of hacking dead children's phone records for news stories.
   The NY Times today reports: Boycott Targets Tabloid's Advertisers, and The Murdoch Style plus Murdoch hacking crisis deepens with war dead outcry in Reuters. Now advertisers are beginning to boycott his newspapers.

Is the sale of Regal's East Harwich cinemas in jeopardy?

Regal is also in the process of selling theater properties like the 6-screen location on Route 137 in Harwich which is under contract with the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School, although that sale appears increasingly at risk due to the school's recent bad publicity and unionizing which tends to scare off investors.

The school had looked into launching a $2 million fundraising campaign to finance the sale. When asked about the status of the campaign, Acting Director of the Lighthouse Charter School Paul Niles replied, "While we did undergo a study designed to help us explore issues related to a capital campaign, we have not launched a campaign. This study helped us to explore issues of capacity and the kinds of infrastructure necessary to carry out a campaign. It is possible that we will choose to conduct a campaign sometime in the future.". We are told the purchase and sale agreement with Regal will expire before long.