January 10, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:The future of the Times
Some colleagues and I were discussing recently whether the Jayson Blair story has had a long-term impact on the New York Times that the Times somehow needs to take corrective action to fix. While I certainly have my issues with the Times, I don't think that the Jayson Blair affair is a proxy for some sort of deep institutional failure at the Times; I think it's an indicator, first, of how vulnerable media sources are to people who make things up, and second, one of the symptoms of Howell Raines' doing a pretty poor job as editor-in-chief. But Howell Raines is gone, and no matter how many times bloggers ask "Don't they have fact-checkers?", the fact is that in journalism, as in accounting, a system capable of detecting every determined fraudster would be a system so ponderous and expensive as to be incapable of doing its job. Furthermore, the overwhelming majorty of current and future readers of the New York Times have never heard of Jayson Blair, and wouldn't much care if they did. So my opinion was that while the Jayson Blair is an ongoing blow to the bragging rights of New York Times reporters, it hasn't hurt the paper in any serious institutional way.
[A colleague pointed out that it might hurt their recruiting efforts. Perhaps so. But the blows to morale at the paper seem to have long predated the Jayson Blair affair, and had more to do with Howell Raines' dictatorial managerial style, and quixotic editorial crusades, than Mr Blair's offenses.]
This Businessweek article, however, indicates that the Times may indeed have serious problems, ones that surprised me:
THE TIMES HAS MANY FEWER READERS outside of New York City than do the two largest national newspapers -- USA Today and The Wall Street Journal -- both of which have circulations far in excess of 2 million. "Those two papers tend to be a more cost-effective buy than the Times just because their circulation across the country is so much larger," says Jeff Piper, vice-president and general manager of Carat Press, a big media buyer. Even in the New York region, where the Times reaches only 14% of all adult readers, the paper's circulation is too diffuse to allow for effective targeting by ZIP Code -- a technique that has enriched many other metro dailies with revenue from inserts.
The Times has gotten less and less interested in local coverage over the years; it's city section, in particular, has gotten pretty perfunctory, while publications like the Sun (full disclosure: I write for their Books section) are moving aggressively to expand theirs. The Times wants to be a national publication, and with good reason, as local dailies continue to die slow and painful deaths throughout the land. But there is probably only room in the national market for a handful of publications, and the Businessweek piece makes it sound as if the effort to go national may have hurt the Times at home, without pushing it over the top nationally:
The reinvention of the Times as a national paper has been accompanied by a steady loss of subscribers in the New York metro area. Its dwindling presence at home has been caused in part by forces beyond its control, including a big influx of non-English-speaking immigrants. However, taking the paper further upscale in pursuit of an elite nationwide readership priced it out of some New Yorkers' reach (a seven-day subscription goes for about $480 a year) and constrained its spending on local marketing and promotion. In addition, the Times has declined to join in the trend of introducing foreign-language editions or free editions for young adult readers. (It may be rethinking its free-paper aversion, as evidenced by The Boston Globe's recent purchase of a 49% stake in Metro Boston, a giveaway tabloid.)I'm extremely surprised to find that the Times has less of a national reach than the WSJ, and even more surprised to find that its local distribution is too fragmented to make an optimal media buy. When you consider that the Wall Street Journal has successfully been pushing into areas long considered the province of the Times, such as arts and politics, I imagine the folks at Times headquarters are as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Plus, they're still struggling to figure out how to make money off this dang Internetty thing:
What's a platform agnostic to do? The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. "The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing -- the Internet -- isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality," says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.
In the long run, I think those sorts of "business side" problems are going to mean much more for the future of the Times than poor editorial choices on a handful of hotbutton stories, or the makeup of its editorial page.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 10, 2005 8:00 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
I have to say that I love the New York Times. I am a conservative and reading the editorials and letters and Krugman can make steam come out of my ears. I love the crossword, the right-hand op-ed portion (especially David Brooks) and I have some fondness for both Friedman and Kristof. I think the science and food sections are second to none in the country and the A section is informative when it decides to be.
However, I'm a grad student in Indiana. I pay about 25 bucks every three months for a 5-day subscription. Whereever I end up next, I can't pay $480 for it.
I'm extremely surprised to find that the Times has less of a national reach than the WSJ...
I'm not surprised at this at all.
The NY Times's main product, from what I can see, is general news. There's simply not much incentive to pay for general news either on the web or in print, because so many folks give it away.
The Wall Street Journal, and other specialized publications (The Economist, National Review, TNR, etc.) don't face quite the same degree of competition. They're all far more unique, IMO, than The New York Times.
Now, I'm not exactly sure what is meant here by "national reach". I suspect the Times is still much more influential than any other publication in the country, and probably the world (there's the Gray Lady's legendary agenda-setting influence, for example, on editors and newsrooms everywhere). And I'm pretty sure the Times is read by a lot more people each day than the WSJ. But again, it's free to do so. The NY Times's big challenge, it seems to me, is translating its influence and its readership (now overwhelmingly on the web) into profits. Once upon a time (like, as recently as the late 90s) advertisers were still willing to shell out big buck for the classified advertising products of the big dailies. But this is where the competition of the web, I think, has been particularly devestating.
I'm sure the Times can't be overly pleased with the fact that Murdoch's Times of London has just moved the other way (made most of its web content free, that is). I suspect they'd charge for all their content in a heartbeat if WaPo moved first. But I gather WaPo has more non-dead-trees revenue streams than the NY Times (to say nothing of Murdoch's papers). The NY Times is a powerful, global brand owned by a company with a nineteenth century business model. I predict they'll one day be bought by the likes of Time Warner or Viacom.
Doesn't the fact that its called "New York" Times make it just that wee bit harder to market in Nebraska than USA today ?
Its worth noting that before it became a national paper, in the UK the Guardian was called the Manchester Guardian. In addition demographic movements have, over the century, decreased the relative weight of New York to the population as a whole so its harder to argue that “New York speaks for America”
The NYT might therefore need to re-brand its self simply the Times or the Times of America if it wants to get national reach.
I was gonna blame its problems on the lack of comics.
Then I remembered 'USA Today' and 'Wall Street Journal' don't have comics either.
'New York Times' must be sinking through the cracks between "too NYC for mass US appeal" and "not NYC enough for NYC."
As they say in France: "Taunt pee!"
I live in Oklahoma, and I would look for USA Today or WSJ long before the NY Times. Plus I consider the New Yorker the most overated magazine in the country. But hey, I live in flyover country.
I hope the NY Times figures it out ... I get free news from them everyday. I pay for the WSJ and it's online service. But to compare the NY Times to Rupert Murdoch's watered-down tabloid ghost of the former (London) Times is not fair to the NY Times. When Murdoch got his hands on the Times of London (so many years ago now that most people don't remember that the Times used to be excellent) he instantly removed the editor, changed the format, lowered the class of reporting and turned it into a vehicle for the kind of news that people pay for - shallow, sensational, without follow-through, and right wing (as opposed to thoughtfully conservative).
Doesn't surprise me. The WSJ (and USA Today) have been walloping the NY Times in other regions of the country for a long time. I grew up in Arkansas and Tennessee in the 1970s, and hardly ever saw a copy of the Times anywhere. The Journal was rare, too, but I'd at least seen copies. But then in the early 1980s, you could buy the WSJ all over the place, and USA Today was shoveled in front of hotel doors from here to low Earth orbit. The Times was still an exotic item.
Their European newstand presence via the International Herald Tribune made the paper almost impossible to find when I lived in Germany in the late 1980s as well. For all its media/business/political clout, the Times isn't a very visible paper.
I've been reading the NY Times online since just about the day they went live (it's one of the few net places where my user id is just my first initial and last name -- and I have a fairly common name).
Even if it was free, there's NO WAY I would every subscribe to the print edition again--who wants to have to shuffle out to the driveway in the cold/dark/snow to retrieve the blue bag and then have to recycle the damn things.
Would I pay for an online subscription, though? I don't know. A couple of years ago, I probably would have, but now--probably not. Certainly not if it was anywhere near as expensive as the paper version. So much of what's in the Times is readily available elsewhere, and what is not available elsewhere is just not that invaluable to me anymore -- the Times Op-Ed writers? I can live without them. There's too much interesting opinion writing available both on the free 'MSM' web sites and the blogsphere to make the Times all that critical.
More trouple down the road for the NYT: the WSJ has announced that they will be adding a Saturday edition this year, IIRC. A coworker get the WSJ, and they have been transforming the paper from a financial news sheet to a national paper of record. The first step was adding the "Weekend" section on Fridays - a mix of reviews, entertainment news (not personalities), and real estate ads. They have been patiently adding nore soft news features - expanding the columns to health, etc.
I got a freebie home subscription for a few weeks that coincided with my 72 year old mother staying with us during cancer treatment. She's a strong liberal and an avid newspaper reader, with several close friends in the business. One day she said to me, with a note of wonder: "This is a really good newspaper!"
MW wrote:
So much of what's in the Times is readily available elsewhere, and what is not available elsewhere is just not that invaluable to me anymore
Good point, so many other newspapers (including our own much maligned Star Tribune) have news articles from the NYT that even if they should decide start to charging for their online paper, chances are you can still read the same articles for free elsewhere.
Also physical newspapers while nice to have when you’re sitting the lunch counter looking for something to read on your lunch break are generally a pain in the neck what with the ink that gets on your hands and having to recycle them. Plus if you work during the day and have a subscription, as a practical matter you often don’t get to read it until you get home in the evening and by then I already know most of what’s gone on in the news.
It’s just not worth it.
I deliberately do not buy the NYT because it editorializes endlessly on its front pages for its gay activist, racial and sexual quota system, feminist ideology. I rip it off and read the things I want to read online. These issues would mostly die of lack of interest if the social reformers who report for the times actually began to fairly report the news.
The Times deserves this. If it ever decides to become a newspaper again, free of this pinhead ideology, I might buy it.
I suspect that this does have an overall result in terms of loss of readership. The audience for that gay activist, quota, feminist ideology is really pretty small, and confined to a few cities and college campuses.
The Times is killing itself. A paper that puts its editorial stance in its news sections is not a reliable source of information. Don't believe that the national readership isn't noticing this.
Uhh, Jane, as a naturalized Texan, with a working man's PhD in Suthern Slang, it ain't a "long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs." It's a "nine-tail cat." Sheesh. You Yankees.
Marcus
Jane, you wrote:
In the long run, I think those sorts of "business side" problems are going to mean much more for the future of the Times than poor editorial choices on a handful of hotbutton stories, or the makeup of its editorial page.
I'm a native New Yorker. I really, really would like to like the Times. But the people who run it are just too arrogant and obnoxious. I would never consider subscribing to it until they undergo a dramatic change in management and shake-up of their operations.
"Poor editorial choices on a handful of stories" doesn't even begin to describe the problems at the Times.
At a minimum they need to stop the daily, pervasive editorial slanting of their alleged straight news stories. Also very helpful would be an immediate moratorium on all cranky, know-it-all, condescending editorials and op-ed's. The editors of the Times seem to have unsolicited (and often dumb) advice available at a moment's notice for everyone from Jersey City to Outer Mongolia.
As it is today, I would not be upset if the New York Times closed down tomorrow. I would throw a big "The Times is dead, long live the Times!" party.
Comments are Closed.