Circling the wagons
HuffPo has a lengthy article,by Thomas Edsall, on prospects for the New York Times, especially if it enters bankruptcy.
A takeover of the New York Times by an outsider would be a cataclysmic event in American journalism. Under control of the two families who have intermarried — the Ochs and the Sulzbergers — the Times is recognized nationally and internationally as the American paper of record, setting a standard, in the scope and the depth of its coverage, that no competitor has ever been able to match over a sustained period of time.
The wagons have been circled, but is it too late? Arguably in a number of areas The Grey Lady did not march with the times. It, along with much of the media, needs a new business model. Personally, Adam likes the FT model where you get so many free views and certain articles per month and then after that you pay varying classes of subscription. Given the NYT’s immense archive and the extent of it’s digitisation of past issues, Adam would think that could be a useful way to monetise traffic. Given that apparently their international traffic is significant, a subscription, a web-based model incorporating some web only material, like The Economist could be attractive and bring in strong revenue without being overly expensive. Such revenue if international would be essentially all bottom line.
Some of Edsall’s article made Adam wonder if NYT bosses have their heads in the sand. He draws his readers attention to an earlier post he made on this topic.
Other relevant posts, by Adam, include The Times they are a changing, More thoughts on dead tree media and Newspapers but not as we know them. The last post covered comments by Steve Coll at the New Yorker on Clay Shirky’s essay published earlier this year.
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