Jim Devine wrote:
much as I'd like to blame "Punch" for the NYT's progressing demise,
aren't most US newspapers veering toward failure these days?
You should read the Vanity Fair article. Here's the relevant passage:
Arthur himself, despite his leftist politics and social liberalism,
despite the lip service he pays to the need for change, is deeply
conservative where the family business is concerned. This is not to say
that he resists change. His nytimes.com is the most successful newspaper
Web site in the country. It can claim an ever rising number of hits and,
until the general economic slump of 2008–9, recorded steady growth in ad
revenue. But none of this will save him, because at the core Arthur and
the Times remain wedded to an archaic model of journalism.
For 10 years or more, Arthur’s signature phrase about this seismic
change in the news business, the one he repeats to show that he gets it,
has been platform agnostic. “I am platform agnostic,” he proclaims
proudly, meaning that it matters nothing to him where his customers go
for New York Times content: the newspaper’s print version, television,
radio, computer, cell phone, Kindle—whatever. The phrase itself reveals
limited understanding. When the motion-picture camera was invented, many
early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value
was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its
audience. To be sure, this alone was a significant change. But the true
pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It
freed them from the confines of a theater. Audiences could be
transported anywhere. To tell stories with pictures, and then with
sound, directors developed a whole new language, using lighting and
camera angles, close-ups and panoramas, to heighten drama and suspense.
They could make an audience laugh by speeding up the action, or make it
cry or quake by slowing it down. In short, the motion-picture camera was
an entirely new tool for storytelling. To be platform agnostic is the
equivalent of recording stage plays.
“When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he
was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set,”
says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism. “But I thought there were two problems with
that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure
what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem
is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You
actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one
comes first. At the time that he was talking about this, what he really
meant was: Everything we put in the newspaper, we’ll put online. If you
really want to move to the Internet in a serious way, you need to change
the culture of a news organization and decide that the Internet is the
primary new thing. Platform agnostic means that all the online companies
are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that
technology while you’re sitting there thinking, Well, we don’t care
which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each
platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform
orthodox. So that expression, platform agnostic, always struck me as
something he heard someplace, rather than something that he really
grasps and understands.”
Arthur’s idea is to continue producing The New York Times the way it has
always been produced, and then to offer a digital edition of the
product, with video, images, interactive graphics, blogs, and so on.
That’s what nytimes.com does superbly. According to Nielsen, it attracts
more than 20 million unique visitors a month. Imagine a newspaper that
was picked up by 20 million readers every month! If only a tiny fraction
of that number came back and became subscribers, circulation would
explode. But those users are not “picking up” the newspaper; many of
them are just picking up individual stories. Nearly half of those who
access nytimes.com to read a story come in, as it were, through a side
door. They begin by plugging search terms into an engine such as Google,
which spits out a long list of links to related sites. And in any case,
they’re not spending a lot of time with the newspaper: the average
amount, says Nielsen, is 35 minutes per month. (The news is worse for
other sites—only about 16 minutes per month for washingtonpost.com.) One
of Arthur’s hopes is that, once on the site, readers will linger,
sampling the Times’s other superb offerings, but usage patterns suggest
that this isn’t happening.
Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full
generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have
short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated
and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more
independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly
by professional journalists, they search out only the information they
want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary
site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not
doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news. It
eliminates the middleman—that is, it eliminates editors. At a newspaper,
top editors meet several times a day to review the stories and
photographs gathered from their own staff and wire services. They decide
which are the most important or compelling, and then they prioritize and
package them. When you buy a newspaper you are buying a carefully
prepared meal. Inevitably stories and artwork are left off the plate for
a great variety of reasons, all of them subjective—they are deemed less
significant, less credible, less tasteful, less useful. Or maybe there
just isn’t enough room. The Internet replaces editors with an algorithm.
Google is a search engine. It makes no value judgment about information
unless you instruct it to. All of the stories and photos in the world
are there, including billions of items that the reader never imagined
wanting to see. It is unmediated. There is no adult supervision. And the
kicker is: it’s free.
Much more is at work here than a change of platform. Whether you think
more is lost or gained depends upon which side of this evolutionary
divide you fall on. For me, someone who spent most of his adult life
working in a newsroom, someone who reads three newspapers every day,
including the Times, the loss will be far greater. Newspapers enable
serious journalism. They provide for the care and feeding of career
reporters and editors. They strive to be fair, accurate, and objective.
They are independent sources of credible, well-researched information.
They are watchdogs for the public interest, an important part of the
communal mind and memory of the nation. When an editor is replaced by an
algorithm, all information is equal. Propaganda shares the platform with
honest reporting, and the slickest, most attractive Web sites and blogs
will be those sponsored by corporations, the government, or special
interests, which can afford to pay for professional work.
Arthur’s argument, or his hope, is that the quality of the Times’s brand
will prevail, that quality independent journalism is so obviously
valuable that serious readers will continue to seek it out. He has been
offering the Times content for free because experience has shown that
subscriber-only stories leak—they are copied and e-mailed and rapidly
proliferate for free anyway—and because Internet users, accustomed to
getting information for free, are loath to pay for it. Do you remove
yourself from the global conversation if you wall yourself off? Can you
make enough money on subscriptions to survive? The Wall Street Journal
has gone in this direction online, while offering some free content. The
jury is still out. Arthur has continued to provide Times content for
free, but is considering reversing direction. His brand remains the best
in the business, but that hasn’t solved his revenue problems. Journalism
costs. The revenue from Internet advertising is still only about a tenth
of total revenue. Even if those millions of brief hits on nytimes.com
continue to swell, the Times itself may be in bankruptcy court long
before the Web site generates enough revenue to replace what Arthur has
lost.
In fairness, no one has the answer for newspapers. Some, such as former
Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, Alan D. Mutter, a former
newspaperman and Silicon Valley C.E.O., and Peter Osnos, of
PublicAffairs, all of whom have experience as executives, are pushing
some form of micro-payment. If the Times, in partnership with the big
search-engine companies, got paid a few pennies for every person who
clicks on a link to its content, it might replace the old business model
for advertising. The price of accessing a single item would be so small
that it would hardly be worth the trouble to hunt up a pirated version.
Some have suggested that all of the major news providers should band
together and withhold their content from the Internet until such a
pricing agreement can be put in place. It seems clear that drastic
action is required. One top editor at another newspaper put it this way:
“Ask yourself this—if the Internet existed and newspapers didn’t, would
there be any reason to invent newspapers? No. That tells you all you
need to know.”
Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur
wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a
slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and
forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as C.F.O. When she
took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was
still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the
ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in
the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by
journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not
businessmen.”
Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative
partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the
Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s
prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the
online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could
have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls.
Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under
the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the
deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented
a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as
a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model
of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific
stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t
do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”
Toward the end of his tenure as executive editor, Max Frankel was asked
to think about the impact of computers on the news business. This was
back in the mid-1990s, when the Times’s national edition was taking off
and most Americans were embarking on their first hesitant drives on the
“information superhighway.” For the Times there was money to maneuver
with, and to invest, and a chance to adapt to the new age. Frankel wrote
two memos, which he no longer has, but whose content he remembers
clearly. In the first memo he argued that, because computers were so
good at generating lists, and cross-referencing them, classified ads in
newspapers were doomed. He suggested that the Times set up a computer
system to allow buyers and sellers to deal with each other directly
online—“It was essentially Craigslist,” Frankel jokes. “I should have
started it up!” Craigslist was created in 1995 and today averages
billions of page hits per month, with reported annual revenues in excess
of $80 million. It is a major factor in the decline of newspaper ad revenue.
“The second idea was much more important, and came a little later,”
Frankel says. “I wrote that one big coming threat posed by the computer
was disaggregation: the Internet disaggregates the hunt for information.
The need for information would survive the advent of the digital era,
but the package offered by The New York Times might not. So how do you
protect the package? What was so great about The New York Times was not
that we offered the best coverage in any particular field but that we
were very good in so many. It was the totality of the newspaper that was
a marvel, not any of its particulars. The Web threatened to break that
up. One way to weather this, which I suggested, was that we needed to
pick the fields in which to be pre-eminent. If you want to have the best
sports package, then start hiring the staff and make yourself the best
go-to place for sports information. If it is business, or
politics—whatever—pick one and make yourself the best, or make a
strategic alliance.” This is the approach taken by ESPN.com, by
Bloomberg.com, IMDB.com, Weather.com, and a multitude of others. Any one
of dozens of sites specializing in, say, politics or the arts could have
been taken over and built up around the Times’s expert staff. It could
still happen. The Washington Post is increasingly staking out the
national government as its field, but an even more immediate threat to
the Times is coming from downtown. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
already has a larger national circulation than the Times, and its
rapacious new owner is vigorously competing on new fronts. Both
newspapers are losing revenue in the current downturn, but the Journal
may be in a better position for the long term. It has a smaller staff,
and a clearly specialized arena with deep importance and broad
appeal—business and finance. It has clearly dominated coverage of the
ongoing economic crisis, with perceptive stories that are more knowingly
reported, more analytical, and consistently better written. Online, the
Journal’s editorial matter is largely password-protected, which means
its readers are already paying for content, and it has been steadily
improving its coverage of culture, sports, and lifestyle, and in its
weekend edition featuring original essays by acclaimed writers and
thinkers. And while the Times is busy throwing assets overboard to stay
afloat, the Journal is attached to Murdoch’s international empire, News
Corp. Arthur aspires to be the patron saint of journalism, but the smart
money may be on the pirate. The kind of specialization Frankel forecast
is also driving most smaller newspapers, which are aggressively focusing
coverage on their own communities, where they have exclusive content.
Many see this as the only strategy that will enable them to survive.
The retired executive editor says that he sent both of his memos up the
chain of command—as he puts it, “off into the ether.” He did not hear a
word from Arthur or anyone else about them.
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