3 ms·

The New York Times has been fighting against anything Google for their advertising network and Facebook for offering alternative news services. With the change

The New York Times has been fighting against anything Google for their advertising network and Facebook for offering alternative news services. With the change of Google News demoting NYT stories this maybe their last chance at being viable as a national news source. Maybe if the NYT would get rid of that paywall they get more readers and relinkers.

fixermark 9y ago
It does seem self-contradictory to attempt to be a news media outlet with exclusive access in a day where information is this easy to replicate and distribute. I think you run the real risk, when you make your content exclusive, of simply being run over by media that doesn't. Unless you can compete on quality, which they usually do but how long and to what end? Facts aren't copyrightable.
jerrylives 9y ago
The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term. It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative). Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.

fixermark 9y ago

It does seem self-contradictory to attempt to be a news media outlet with exclusive access in a day where information is this easy to replicate and distribute. I think you run the real risk, when you make your content exclusive, of simply being run over by media that doesn't. Unless you can compete on quality, which they usually do but how long and to what end? Facts aren't copyrightable.

jerrylives 9y ago

The New York Times is severely fucked even without Google messing with their rankings. They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term. It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative). Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.