The obvious reaction of libertarians and conservatives to news that the leftist Air America radio has filed for bankruptcy is to claim this means there’s no market for left-of-center political commentary. But that’s obviously not quite right: progressive blogs have plenty of readers, and left-wing books seem to sell about as well as right-wing books.
I think a more plausible explanation for Air America’s poor performance is poor timing. The network came onto the scene at roughly the same time as a number of other media sources that competed directly for the same yuppie demographic that Al Franken appeals to. Left-of-center blogs rose to prominence in 2003 and were a force in Democratic politics for the first time in 2004. By 2004, The Daily Show had become the source for television news and satire among 20- and 30-something professionals. And a lot of young people began relying on their iPods, rather than the radio, for in-car entertainment. In short, Air America was fighting for a bigger piece of a shrinking demographic.
It seems like this flaw was exacerbated by high overhead. The network lost “$8.6 million in 2004 and $19.6 million last year, and has lost $13.1 million so far in 2006.” It’s not clear to me why it costs tens of millions of dollars to produce half a dozen daily talk shows. If those figures are driven by distribution costs–the article mentions that the network owes money to the stations that carry its programming–that seems like a big part of the problem. Their blogging and podcasting competitors are able to reach arbitrarily large audiences for essentially zero cost. Spending a lot of money to break into an over-crowded market for punditry via expensive and declining distribution format seems like a recipe for disaster.
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