Washington: Who'd have thunk Donald Trump, king of social media, might be a saviour for old-fashioned media - you know, the likes of the "phony", "fake" and "failing" New York Times?
What industry analysts call a "Trump bump" is turbo-charging new digital subscriptions and even sales of quaint old print editions for dozens of publishing houses, along with a surge in some of their share prices.
In February, online subscriptions for the Times crashed through the 3 million mark and in coming weeks it anticipates another historical milestone - an unprecedented half million hike in subscriptions in just six months. Since the election, there have been days when the Times signed as many as 10,000 new subscribers.
The Times' rival, The Washington Post, is going gangbusters too. In November 2016, the election month, the Post figured that a rush of new subscriptions was a peak from which it would inevitably slide. But January saw another surge, which amounted to a year-on-year double-digit rise in subscription revenue and a 75 percent increase in new subscribers.
The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are piling on new readers and things are looking up at The Boston Globe too - in just the first six weeks of 2017 it signed up almost half as many new digital subscribers as it did in all of 2016.
It's not just the old-guard princes of daily print that are surging.
Despite throwing up a paywall in 2014, The New Yorker magazine enjoyed a first-year online bump of 85 per cent. And the election gave it another solid spurt - from the election to the end of January it signed up 250,000 new subscribers, a 230 per cent lift on the same period a year earlier, to give it a combined print and online circulation of 1.1 million.
The Atlantic is charging ahead too, doubling its rate of new online subscriptions in November-December. Print sales for The Atlantic are up too - by 15 per cent on last year, which included a 40,000-issue second print run of the January issue to meet unexpected demand at newsstands.
The magazine set an online record in January and promptly smashed it in February when it clocked up 33.6 million unique visitors for the month.
Vanity Fair is laughing too. Trump's tweeted attacks on the monthly magazine have been as merciless as those he has fired at the Times, like this in mid-December: "Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine? Way down, big trouble, dead! [Editor] Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!"
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
Trump was presumed to be striking back at the magazine's withering review of Trump Grill, the restaurant in his Manhattan tower. Instead, almost a million readers clicked the review in the weeks after the review and subscriptions increased a hundredfold.
It's early days, to be sure. But surging online subscriptions alleviate the funding crisis that has beset old media since the advent of the internet - dwindling newsgathering budgets as a response to dramatically shrinking advertising revenue.
Trump is already assured of his place in political history, but he is destined too for a serious mention in media history - as the guy who seemingly flipped the switch to a viable new readership-revenue business model, when publishers were struggling to cope with the decimation of their traditional advertising-based model.
If figures from The New York Times are a guide, then the future for old guard media is significantly less reliant on advertising - reader subscription fees now account for about 60 per cent of Times revenue, about double their share 10 years ago.
And that hope of a more certain future is showing in the Times' share price. In the week before the presidential poll it hit a low of $US10.80, but last week it was trading at $US14.70 - a rise of 36 per cent in four months.
As reported by Politico: "Add it all up, and the Times, ironically, becomes the first major beneficiary of the Trump times. The Times - struggling for almost a decade to regain its business footing given both the print-to-digital transformation and the Great Recession - may finally be on the brink of a sustainable future."
The editor-in-chief of Slate, Jacob Weisberg, cast the readership surge in these terms: "People do recognise that independent media is part of the thing that keeps us from authoritarianism, but it's partly that people are just consuming a lot of media and news content."
Agreeing, The New Yorker's editor David Remnick told The Street: "I think we're also at a moment where the values of truth and the values of what the press should be at its best are not only in question, but being questioned by the President of the United States in the most uncertain and aggressive terms.
"And I think people, and this is part of what gives me a lot of optimism ... I don't think people want to put up with it. I think people want to know. They're not easily cowed or deceived. And I think tens of millions people think that way."
Searching for a precedent, The Street revisited media statistics from the Watergate era, figuring that in the midst of such an historic scandal there surely had to have been a comparable readership surge.
"The answer: not much of one," it reports. "In fact, the Times' circulation barely changed between 1970 and 1974, the year in which Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon finally helicoptered out of the White House. That [print] circulation [was] 1.45 million [and] it is the digital world that has now allowed the Times to double that number."
Funnily, part of the kick-along in readership is rooted in the troubling notion that these days people are watching "the news", as in the network bulletins, for entertainment while turning to "entertainment" - late-night TV comics like HBO's John Oliver - for news.
The week after Trump was elected, Oliver gave a heartfelt shout-out for The New York Times, The Washington Post and ProPublica, the internet-based, non-profit investigative journalism venture, decrying "fake" facts in a pitch for his audience to "support actual journalism" which garnered more than seven million views on YouTube.
In the face of the Trump challenge, many in the media are adopting new taglines - The New Yorker has "Fighting fake stories with real ones" and The Washington Post's masthead is now adorned by the addition of "Democracy Dies in Darkness". And readers clicking on the homepage of The New York Times are greeted these days by an ever-changing range of similar sentiments.
Thank you, Donald - couldn't have done it without you.
