By Joe Concha - 12-20-16 06:00 AM EST
President-elect Donald Trump's November victory has been a boon for liberal news outlets, which are getting big business from voters shocked by the billionaire's surprise win over Hillary Clinton.
Instead of wallowing in despair, left-leaning voters are buying subscriptions to The New York Times and Vanity Fair while tuning in to television programs with a liberal slant.
"We've seen weeks of 10 times the subscription adds that we saw in the same period last year," Times CEO Mark Thompson said at the Dec. 5 UBS Global Media and Communications Conference.
Attacks by Trump on the Times have been frequent, but don't appear to have hurt the publication.
Wow, the @nytimes is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the "Trump phenomena"
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2016
The Times has exceeded 200,000 new digital-only subscriptions during the fourth quarter alone, Thompson said.
"We're seeing ... a surge and I would say more broadly that we expect the lively news cycle to continue in America well into 2017," he added.
The Washington Post, which like the Times has been attacked by Trump, reported 99.1 million unique visitors in November 2016, according to comScore, a global media measurement and analytics company.
The number of unique visitors to WashingtonPost.com marks a 38 percent increase over last year.
Liberal commentators have called on people to subscribe to such publications, in part as a response to "fake news" stories that some blamed for the election result.
John Oliver, the host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight," implored his viewers to not only subscribe to publications such as the Times and Post, but to local newspapers and non-profit journalism outlets like ProPublica.
Richard Tofel, ProPublica's president and founding general manager, told The Hill on Monday that they have seen a considerable increase in donations since Oliver's program.
"In small-dollar donations, we had 3,300 last year," Tofel said.
He defined such as donations as those unsolicited by ProPublica and under $10,000.
"This year, we've had more than 19,000 small-dollar donations," he said.
Tofel added that the publication is on track to receive $1.5 million total in donations, up from $500,000 in 2015.
Other publications, from The Atlantic to Mother Jones to the New Yorker, have also reported huge subscription increases since Election Day.
Vanity Fair advertised itself as the magazine "Trump doesn't want you to read" after the president-elect slammed it on Twitter.
Trump was angered by Vanity Fair's scathing review of Trump Grill, ripping the magazine's editor, Graydon Carter, a frequent sparring partner who once needled the businessman for having small hands.
Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
Within 24 hours of Trump's response, Vanity Fair had racked up 13,000 new subscribers.
"This is the highest number of subscriptions even sold in a single day at Cond Nast, Vanity Fair's parent company," a spokesperson said.
"Saturday Night Live" has seen a ratings spike from Trump.
Its season opener was its highest-rated show in eight years, with 8.3 million viewers.
The venerable program's last episode opened with a skit about Trump lampooning the president-elect's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
An actor playing Putin came down the chimney, bare-chested, as Santa Clause, giving Trump an Elf on the Shelf and asking that he keep it close to his internet router.
Ratings for the Dec. 17 episode were up 14 percent versus the same week last year.
Trump has repeatedly ripped the program's portrayal of him on Twitter, leading to more attention for the skits.
This week, Trump did not publicly respond to the new skit.
No comments:
Post a Comment