Comedian John Oliver has taken aim at the newspaper industry in the US, with his show Last Week Tonight parodying the oscar-winning film Spotlight, renaming it to Stoplight to paint a “depressing accurate” picture of the modern media landscape.
In the most recent episode of the program, which is famous for its deep-dives on a vast range of topics, Oliver looks at newspaper journalism and how the businesses funding it are pivoting to a “digital first” model, that is seeing the sector chase clicks at the detriment of content and the journalists employed to create it.
Oliver outlined that other media organisations are constantly citing newspaper journalism, saying that the “media food chain would fall apart without local newspapers”, however he pointed to the decline in print advertising revenue and the inability of digital ad dollars to plug the hole, as putting these publishers and their papers in trouble.
The show produced a graph that highlighted between 2004 - 2014 newspapers in the US gained $2 billion in digital ad revenue, while in the same period they lost $30bn in print revenue. Oliver equated that to “finding a lucky penny on the pavement, the same day your bank account is drained by a 16-year-old Belgian hacker.”
Oliver also took aim at the trend of publishers repositioning themselves to be “content” businesses, using the Tribune Publishing company as an example. This year the publisher, which produces papers Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, rebranded to Tronc aka Tribune Online Content.
The piece ends with Stoplight, a film that centres around a journalist who discovers corruption going all the way to the top of the church, but rather he's pulled off the story to write about the allusive raccoon-cat.
Watch the video for yourself below:
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