9 ms·

That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model

by Dwolb 8y ago

That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success. The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5. Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus. In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

Illniyar 8y ago
Is 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top. If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no? Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and probably higher then most non-tech, non-oil businesses
- csomar 8y ago
  The tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > tech bubble I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.
    - namdnay 8y ago
      I think the idea of comparing to the tech bubble is that it has skewed our perceptions of how much a company should make per employee, and how fast it should grow. Indeed many bubble companies are making little or no profits, but they don't have 3700 employees to pay every month + printing presses, buildings etc. The ROI is very different
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > The ROI is very different If you’re making “little or no profits” you have no ROI.
        namdnay 8y ago
        The idea being that you plan to make massive profits down the line. No VC is expecting their startups to cruise comfortably at 3700 employees and 80M yearly profit
eksemplar 8y ago
It’s worry some that people have shifted their focus to unedited and often fairly anonymous sources for news. HN is honestly a good example as well. I’ve written numerous upvoted posts sharing information about the Scandinavian public sector and tech-management, but I’m not a vetted source. I mean, you can’t even tell if I’m Scandinavian from HN. My squabbling is relatively harmless of course, but it’s not always like this. If I was a different person I could’ve spent my time writing anti-vaccination stuff on another media, and people would have put the same sort of trust in my words. Not HN users, at least I’d like to think so, but a lot of people would have. That’s insanely dangerous to a free society, because we rely on truth, and right now there really isn’t a lot of it going around.
- jkalo 8y ago
  True. I think ppl think the Russians or who ever have to create content farms to spread fud. All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting. Media and social media are trained like lab rats to pick up anything that is getting views and amplify it. The underlying architecture has to change. The feedback mechanisms that drive this must be slowed down or removed.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    > All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting. Or just get bots / click farmers to do all the work. The crackpots will latch on eventually...
_rpd 8y ago
Their stock dropped 5% because the market perceived ‘slowing digital subscriber growth’. So not all good news even for NYT.
PakG1 8y ago
That extrapolates to $84,000,000 profit per year. As a comparison, NYT made $397,536,000 in net income in 2000. https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2000_Annual_Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... $259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2005NYTannual.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.
- gonvaled 8y ago
  What was the profit in 2000?
  - hkmurakami 8y ago
    Net income = profit
- ameister14 8y ago
  Jesus, they went from close to 400 million on 3.6 billion revenue to 96 on 1.6 billion revenue, and it's a success? Really puts into perspective how tumultuous the last 15 years has been for even the biggest newspapers.
  - matwood 8y ago
    > and it's a success? Compared to going out of business in a changing landscape, absolutely it's a success. The music industry went through something similar. The book industry (textbooks in particular) are about to go through it also.
    - lobotryas 8y ago
      What do you mean in regards to textbooks? Online rentals, digital textbooks, or something else? I ask only as someone (of many) who deeply resents textbook price gouging.
dingaling 8y ago
> only turn 24M a quarter, That's $24 million left unspent after salaries, benefits, travel and accommodation, equipment purchases, AP and Bloomberg fees, client entertainment, interest repayment, rents, board jollies... I don't see what's unhealthily low about that profit.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  In the long run of a decade, it's risky to bet on sustainable growth after the Trump era ends. Doubly so if he doesn't get re-elected.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  It depends on what the ROI and risks are. If you spend $100M a year to earn $1M in net profit, and your business is completely dependent on advertising and/or has declining subscription revenues then that’s terrible. There are much better ROIs to be had, so an investor would be better off investing elsewhere. Also, reporting faces heavy legal, travel, lodging, equipment, and food expenses and those don’t end up in the asset column in case of a sale. I guess the articles and copyright would help, but it doesn’t seem to be worth much.
  - shripadk 8y ago
    Why wouldn't equipment end up in asset column in case of a sale? Equipment is a fixed asset so it'll just be a transfer of asset at book value with gain/loss recorded in the sellers income statement. EDIT: When you talk about "asset column" I'm assuming you mean the asset column in the books of accounts of the buyer.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      It would, I was just assuming a good portion of a news agency's equipment isn't as valuable in re-sale like personal computers, office equipment, etc.
nkkollaw 8y ago
This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad. If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT). Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them with independent content creators. Independent content creators often make even a lot of money via Patreon because people like their content and support them, and often the quality and level of knowledge is 100 times better than small publications that are only interested in clicks. For instance, see the coverage of solar roadways, Hyperloop and many other science-related topics by specialized publications vs. the debunking videos made by youtuber Thunderf00t. While those publications will just have interns write copycat articles to bring in clicks, he's an actual scientist that looks into/debunks the topics at hand with a unique point of view, and actually covers the news critically. I'd much rather give him $5/mo. to keep producing good content then the "professional" newspaper $0.50/mo. to read their crappy content or even worse be bombarded by ads if I visit their website. Of course, independent content creators will not take a plane to go cover a war or cannot afford to spend 2 years without publishing an article to do investigative journalism, but I think those publications that provide that value gets recognized by people and those will rightfully stay alive.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Nor will independent content creators for the most part go to a lot of boring town and city meetings to find out what's going on--or develop relationships with the various low level officials/administrators. A number of years back my town had a local newspaper that was basically someone's labor of love. It no longer has one so I have essentially no source of information about any town issues I might want to be aware of. That doesn't matter to me for the most part but it would be nice to know about happenings/votes/etc. that affect me.
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    > that doesn't matter to me for the most part I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them. The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.
nothis 8y ago
There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each. What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.
- thinkloop 8y ago
  "Because that’s not how we use the web. People don’t visit a single site to seek out content. They search then nimbly hop from link to link building knowledge from an amalgamation of sources. The entire web is one big site." "Given these usage patterns, paywalls fail miserably. The typical consumer would have to sign up to hundreds of properties, costing thousands of dollars per month. If they consumed every bit of content at the New York Times, the $25/month could be fair. But they don’t, leaving them with a glut of extremely underutilized and over-priced subscriptions." https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276f2 https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276...
- chii 8y ago
  > What I can imagine is a "digital pass" this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.
  - orf 8y ago
    The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).
Kurtz79 8y ago
Newspapers were never valued for their ability of generating profits, but more as tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. Having "few" and "consolidated" reporting entities basically reflects the status-quo pre-internet, where at a local/national level you would have a handful of newspapers (or TV channels), each having often a fairly evident slant or clearly lobbying for a particular political party or social group. But while we shouldn't view the past in an excessively positive way, it's hard to consider an improvement what we are moving towards, a situation where there are far and far more numerous and uncontrolled sources of infomation, amplified by social media. At least (most) traditional newspapers always had the obligation of fact-checking, a burden that a spurious blog or forum post or twitter message doesn't have...
- pmyteh 8y ago
  Newspapers in the US were absolutely valued for their ability to generate profits. Local classified advertising revenue alone was enough that throughout the 80s and early 90s it was a very lucrative business to be in. They're also tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. And not all markets have been profitable: in the UK, for example, the desire for political influence generated so many competing national newspapers that most of them lost money.
guessthejuice 8y ago
> That’s just insane. It really isn't. It's why wall street is selling on the news. > This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. It really isn't. It's why their share price dropped nearly 7% on the news. Their subscriber growth declined. That's not a good thing. > NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. NYT "switch" isn't even the most public or well-executed in their own industry. I'd give that nod to news corp and their properties - not that they are doing much better. NYT is playing catch-up. > In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic. That's true. But the NYT is just as bought as any forum and gaslights as much as any politician. After all the NYT was created by a politician and a banker. It's in their DNA. I do agree that fewer media entities will be detrimental to the republic. Unfortunately, the NYT along with CNN/WaPo is at the forefront of taking out smaller independent media entities.
- d46ft7gy8hu 8y ago
  Throw away account. If News Corp is the standard we're holding news companies to, we have a serious issue. It's totally disorganized, has no idea what it's trying to achieve and more focused on political outcomes than it is building actual value for shareholders. There is zero leadership, and that leadership there is gets sent to unrelated (but related) companies like Fox. If it wasn't for a few golden gooses that News Corp acquired decades again, there is no way they could fund their cash burning newspapers. NYT producing any positive revenue is amazing, i hope they continue to build upon this.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    I think he's referring to cases like the Times of London, which went totally paywalled and became profitable in 2014 for the first time since 2001: https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/times-newspapers-posts-17m-profit-first-in-13-years https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/tim... (gotta link to the Guardian for that story because, of course, the Times' own coverage is paywalled)
repolfx 8y ago
Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5 That's pretty what we already have actually. The amount of original reporting done on a major news story is far, far lower than the number of newspapers out there. This study from 2010 is useful: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-case-how-many-news-outlets-do-the-original-reporting-on-a-big-story/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-cas... Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently. Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China). The story being studied had an international dimension which bumped up the number of outlets doing original reporting, as it was impactful to both the USA and China. Most stories that are only relevant to one country would have far fewer. This is one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is shrinking - the internet makes it clear for the first time how little original reporting there really is, and how much duplication of that little original reporting goes on. As for picking teams, gaslighting etc ... US media is experiencing a surge in profits right now, and as far as I can tell the reason is that they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality. They've become anti-Trump cheerleaders that are more in the business of helping their readers feel superior than in the business of real news. It's hard to blame them because this appears to be a more profitable business to be in than trying to be neutral and it's caused a surge in trust amongst democrats only. But of course it makes them vulnerable, even in a country with the first amendment. The USA doesn't have a president who hates the media for no reason.
- bjourne 8y ago
  Trump hated "the Media" long before he became president. The idea that "the Media" are anti-Trump cheerleaders need some corrobating evidence because otherwise it is bullshit.
  - a_tractor 8y ago
    >Trump hated "the Media" long before he became president. Because it is obvious how they operate, and its only becoming more and more blatant. What that means is he is probably the least surprised by how they are behaving now. It was clear throughout his campaign that he was prepared for it. >corrobating (sic) evidence because otherwise I mean, really? Just turn on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, even Comedy Central... open up a copy of the NYT, or go check out HuffPo. It is obvious. Turn on any late-night comedy show, Trevor Noah, Colbert... Watch the Oscars. If you need more than that, then I am not sure what you mean by evidence...
Consultant32452 8y ago
I disagree, the number of reporters and the diversity of them has increased greatly in the Twitter/YouTube universe. I'd much rather get my news from a 3 hour Joe Rogan podcast with a subject matter expert than a hot take from yet another person from the same small group of universities who have been manufacturing our reporters for generations.
dalbasal 8y ago
I wouldn't worry about the profit itself. It's important to NYT and their investors but not necessarily indicative of industry viability. More important (IMO) is the number of subscribers, at total revenue, the total amount of money paid to NYT by subscribers. This is how much money is available to run NYT sustainably. They had 3.8m subscribers, with 2.9m digital only. Revenue is/was $415m for the quarter (1.65bn annualized). $100m (25%) of that was from digital subscriptions. They make more from ads. So... for the industry... I don't think this means much. It's an existence proof for paid subscriptions, as an important revenue source. It is not an existence proof for a paper funded primarily via subscriptions. A remarkable (maybe even exciting to some journalists) is that this represents a digital version of the print business model. It's a good thing in the sense that this promotes good content, and less hyperbole and clickbait. IDK how I feel about the desire to revive the print subcription model. The ability to share, read articles wherever they happen to be published, search the web for articles... paywalls break these. Maybe we need to go back to go forward, but this step feels like a regression... to me.
douglaswlance 8y ago
Instead of 50 professional reports, we'll have millions of independent journalists that aren't tangled in a web of multi-national conglomerate corporations. We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system. Trust in humanity's ability to adapt.
- asdfman123 8y ago
  That's not what's happening right now, though. What's happening right now is that people are turning to less credible news sources and are growing increasingly misinformed. It means a guy like Alex Jones can't be run out of town even if what he's saying is complete nonsense, because he can always turn to the internet. Plus, trolls funded by very well endowed state actors can now pretend to be among those "independent journalists" and completely muddy the waters. Humanity doesn't always evolve for the better. The developed world lives in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity, but don't make the mistake of believing that progress is the norm or that we've reached the end of history. It's possible to throw it all away with stupidity, propaganda, greed and infighting, and I have no doubt humanity is fully capable of reverting to that. In fact, given a long enough timeframe it's probably inevitable.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system. Oh yeah, so the blockchain will somehow save this? (cough) The best "consensus" system we've got for social media / forums is the upvote / downvote and that is a horrible indicator of truthfulness / factfullness / quality of something. Upvote / downvote is only an indicator of the prevailing groupthink on any given forum -- it is not a substitute for a reality check.
conanbatt 8y ago
OTOH news has been replaced by social media, which is cheaper. I do not see this demise as a bad thing. Diversity is a goal better achieved by individuals, not by a big number of large newspapers. Also newspapers have been for a long time a business not particularly profitable on its sales, but on how its used to leverage other businesses. Failing Newspapers always find investors even if the biz is bad.
- azinman2 8y ago
  Social media? So just anyone with no credibility, oversight, quality control, resources, connections, or training? It’s great that individuals can funnel up stories that would otherwise be buried — but that’s no replacement for true journalism. Journalism hardly perfect, but does have a much, much higher bar.
  - lenkite 8y ago
    Depends on the type of social media. I got more real news (supported by multiple corroborating facts and folks who experienced events) on the Syria Civil war from the reddit Syrian Civil war forum than the continuous propaganda published/broadcasted by the American MSM. Whenever folks published videos that were countervailing to the established narrative, Ex: modern NATO weapons in ISIS hands being used to shell civilians or the 'moderate' rebels keeping and chaining female slaves, it was just a matter of hours before the video was reported and taken down. I spent a fair amount of time verifying information. It truly opened my eyes to what 'narrative' based Journalism means. I no longer trust any of the MSM channels.
    - azinman2 8y ago
      And how do you know the sources of any of such videos? That they themselves aren’t propaganda being put out by another state actor? That’s the role of journalists.. to find such videos and verify them. To put people on the ground in Syria, fact finding and interviewing. It’s not like America is the only country with free as in speech journalism online — go read other papers if you believe the American ones are so distorted. My guess is you won’t find basic facts so challenged.

by Dwolb 8y ago

Illniyar 8y ago

Is 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top. If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no? Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and probably higher then most non-tech, non-oil businesses

csomar 8y ago
The tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > tech bubble I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.
  - namdnay 8y ago
    I think the idea of comparing to the tech bubble is that it has skewed our perceptions of how much a company should make per employee, and how fast it should grow. Indeed many bubble companies are making little or no profits, but they don't have 3700 employees to pay every month + printing presses, buildings etc. The ROI is very different
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > The ROI is very different If you’re making “little or no profits” you have no ROI.
      - namdnay 8y ago
        The idea being that you plan to make massive profits down the line. No VC is expecting their startups to cruise comfortably at 3700 employees and 80M yearly profit

eksemplar 8y ago

It’s worry some that people have shifted their focus to unedited and often fairly anonymous sources for news. HN is honestly a good example as well. I’ve written numerous upvoted posts sharing information about the Scandinavian public sector and tech-management, but I’m not a vetted source. I mean, you can’t even tell if I’m Scandinavian from HN. My squabbling is relatively harmless of course, but it’s not always like this. If I was a different person I could’ve spent my time writing anti-vaccination stuff on another media, and people would have put the same sort of trust in my words. Not HN users, at least I’d like to think so, but a lot of people would have. That’s insanely dangerous to a free society, because we rely on truth, and right now there really isn’t a lot of it going around.

jkalo 8y ago
True. I think ppl think the Russians or who ever have to create content farms to spread fud. All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting. Media and social media are trained like lab rats to pick up anything that is getting views and amplify it. The underlying architecture has to change. The feedback mechanisms that drive this must be slowed down or removed.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > All bad actors have to do is find lunatics with fringe views and keep upvoting. Or just get bots / click farmers to do all the work. The crackpots will latch on eventually...

_rpd 8y ago

Their stock dropped 5% because the market perceived ‘slowing digital subscriber growth’. So not all good news even for NYT.

PakG1 8y ago

That extrapolates to $84,000,000 profit per year. As a comparison, NYT made $397,536,000 in net income in 2000. https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2000_Annual_Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... $259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2005NYTannual.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2... That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.

gonvaled 8y ago
What was the profit in 2000?
- hkmurakami 8y ago
  Net income = profit
ameister14 8y ago
Jesus, they went from close to 400 million on 3.6 billion revenue to 96 on 1.6 billion revenue, and it's a success? Really puts into perspective how tumultuous the last 15 years has been for even the biggest newspapers.
- matwood 8y ago
  > and it's a success? Compared to going out of business in a changing landscape, absolutely it's a success. The music industry went through something similar. The book industry (textbooks in particular) are about to go through it also.
  - lobotryas 8y ago
    What do you mean in regards to textbooks? Online rentals, digital textbooks, or something else? I ask only as someone (of many) who deeply resents textbook price gouging.

dingaling 8y ago

> only turn 24M a quarter, That's $24 million left unspent after salaries, benefits, travel and accommodation, equipment purchases, AP and Bloomberg fees, client entertainment, interest repayment, rents, board jollies... I don't see what's unhealthily low about that profit.

creaghpatr 8y ago
In the long run of a decade, it's risky to bet on sustainable growth after the Trump era ends. Doubly so if he doesn't get re-elected.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
It depends on what the ROI and risks are. If you spend $100M a year to earn $1M in net profit, and your business is completely dependent on advertising and/or has declining subscription revenues then that’s terrible. There are much better ROIs to be had, so an investor would be better off investing elsewhere. Also, reporting faces heavy legal, travel, lodging, equipment, and food expenses and those don’t end up in the asset column in case of a sale. I guess the articles and copyright would help, but it doesn’t seem to be worth much.
- shripadk 8y ago
  Why wouldn't equipment end up in asset column in case of a sale? Equipment is a fixed asset so it'll just be a transfer of asset at book value with gain/loss recorded in the sellers income statement. EDIT: When you talk about "asset column" I'm assuming you mean the asset column in the books of accounts of the buyer.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    It would, I was just assuming a good portion of a news agency's equipment isn't as valuable in re-sale like personal computers, office equipment, etc.

nkkollaw 8y ago

This is just my opinion, but things change. Change is not necessarily bad. If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT). Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them with independent content creators. Independent content creators often make even a lot of money via Patreon because people like their content and support them, and often the quality and level of knowledge is 100 times better than small publications that are only interested in clicks. For instance, see the coverage of solar roadways, Hyperloop and many other science-related topics by specialized publications vs. the debunking videos made by youtuber Thunderf00t. While those publications will just have interns write copycat articles to bring in clicks, he's an actual scientist that looks into/debunks the topics at hand with a unique point of view, and actually covers the news critically. I'd much rather give him $5/mo. to keep producing good content then the "professional" newspaper $0.50/mo. to read their crappy content or even worse be bombarded by ads if I visit their website. Of course, independent content creators will not take a plane to go cover a war or cannot afford to spend 2 years without publishing an article to do investigative journalism, but I think those publications that provide that value gets recognized by people and those will rightfully stay alive.

ghaff 8y ago
Nor will independent content creators for the most part go to a lot of boring town and city meetings to find out what's going on--or develop relationships with the various low level officials/administrators. A number of years back my town had a local newspaper that was basically someone's labor of love. It no longer has one so I have essentially no source of information about any town issues I might want to be aware of. That doesn't matter to me for the most part but it would be nice to know about happenings/votes/etc. that affect me.
- nkkollaw 8y ago
  > that doesn't matter to me for the most part I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them. The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.

nothis 8y ago

There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each. What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.

thinkloop 8y ago
"Because that’s not how we use the web. People don’t visit a single site to seek out content. They search then nimbly hop from link to link building knowledge from an amalgamation of sources. The entire web is one big site." "Given these usage patterns, paywalls fail miserably. The typical consumer would have to sign up to hundreds of properties, costing thousands of dollars per month. If they consumed every bit of content at the New York Times, the $25/month could be fair. But they don’t, leaving them with a glut of extremely underutilized and over-priced subscriptions." https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276f2 https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276...
chii 8y ago
> What I can imagine is a "digital pass" this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.
- orf 8y ago
  The BBC isn't directly funded by taxes in the usual sense (and therefore the government, which is a tricky situation to be in). It's funded by the collection of a license required when you have a TV, and it's collected by the BBC itself (in reality outsourced).

Kurtz79 8y ago

Newspapers were never valued for their ability of generating profits, but more as tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. Having "few" and "consolidated" reporting entities basically reflects the status-quo pre-internet, where at a local/national level you would have a handful of newspapers (or TV channels), each having often a fairly evident slant or clearly lobbying for a particular political party or social group. But while we shouldn't view the past in an excessively positive way, it's hard to consider an improvement what we are moving towards, a situation where there are far and far more numerous and uncontrolled sources of infomation, amplified by social media. At least (most) traditional newspapers always had the obligation of fact-checking, a burden that a spurious blog or forum post or twitter message doesn't have...

pmyteh 8y ago
Newspapers in the US were absolutely valued for their ability to generate profits. Local classified advertising revenue alone was enough that throughout the 80s and early 90s it was a very lucrative business to be in. They're also tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. And not all markets have been profitable: in the UK, for example, the desire for political influence generated so many competing national newspapers that most of them lost money.

guessthejuice 8y ago

> That’s just insane. It really isn't. It's why wall street is selling on the news. > This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. It really isn't. It's why their share price dropped nearly 7% on the news. Their subscriber growth declined. That's not a good thing. > NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. NYT "switch" isn't even the most public or well-executed in their own industry. I'd give that nod to news corp and their properties - not that they are doing much better. NYT is playing catch-up. > In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic. That's true. But the NYT is just as bought as any forum and gaslights as much as any politician. After all the NYT was created by a politician and a banker. It's in their DNA. I do agree that fewer media entities will be detrimental to the republic. Unfortunately, the NYT along with CNN/WaPo is at the forefront of taking out smaller independent media entities.

d46ft7gy8hu 8y ago
Throw away account. If News Corp is the standard we're holding news companies to, we have a serious issue. It's totally disorganized, has no idea what it's trying to achieve and more focused on political outcomes than it is building actual value for shareholders. There is zero leadership, and that leadership there is gets sent to unrelated (but related) companies like Fox. If it wasn't for a few golden gooses that News Corp acquired decades again, there is no way they could fund their cash burning newspapers. NYT producing any positive revenue is amazing, i hope they continue to build upon this.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I think he's referring to cases like the Times of London, which went totally paywalled and became profitable in 2014 for the first time since 2001: https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/times-newspapers-posts-17m-profit-first-in-13-years https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/tim... (gotta link to the Guardian for that story because, of course, the Times' own coverage is paywalled)

repolfx 8y ago

Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5 That's pretty what we already have actually. The amount of original reporting done on a major news story is far, far lower than the number of newspapers out there. This study from 2010 is useful: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-case-how-many-news-outlets-do-the-original-reporting-on-a-big-story/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-cas... Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently. Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China). The story being studied had an international dimension which bumped up the number of outlets doing original reporting, as it was impactful to both the USA and China. Most stories that are only relevant to one country would have far fewer. This is one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is shrinking - the internet makes it clear for the first time how little original reporting there really is, and how much duplication of that little original reporting goes on. As for picking teams, gaslighting etc ... US media is experiencing a surge in profits right now, and as far as I can tell the reason is that they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality. They've become anti-Trump cheerleaders that are more in the business of helping their readers feel superior than in the business of real news. It's hard to blame them because this appears to be a more profitable business to be in than trying to be neutral and it's caused a surge in trust amongst democrats only. But of course it makes them vulnerable, even in a country with the first amendment. The USA doesn't have a president who hates the media for no reason.

bjourne 8y ago
Trump hated "the Media" long before he became president. The idea that "the Media" are anti-Trump cheerleaders need some corrobating evidence because otherwise it is bullshit.
- a_tractor 8y ago
  >Trump hated "the Media" long before he became president. Because it is obvious how they operate, and its only becoming more and more blatant. What that means is he is probably the least surprised by how they are behaving now. It was clear throughout his campaign that he was prepared for it. >corrobating (sic) evidence because otherwise I mean, really? Just turn on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, even Comedy Central... open up a copy of the NYT, or go check out HuffPo. It is obvious. Turn on any late-night comedy show, Trevor Noah, Colbert... Watch the Oscars. If you need more than that, then I am not sure what you mean by evidence...

Consultant32452 8y ago

I disagree, the number of reporters and the diversity of them has increased greatly in the Twitter/YouTube universe. I'd much rather get my news from a 3 hour Joe Rogan podcast with a subject matter expert than a hot take from yet another person from the same small group of universities who have been manufacturing our reporters for generations.

dalbasal 8y ago

I wouldn't worry about the profit itself. It's important to NYT and their investors but not necessarily indicative of industry viability. More important (IMO) is the number of subscribers, at total revenue, the total amount of money paid to NYT by subscribers. This is how much money is available to run NYT sustainably. They had 3.8m subscribers, with 2.9m digital only. Revenue is/was $415m for the quarter (1.65bn annualized). $100m (25%) of that was from digital subscriptions. They make more from ads. So... for the industry... I don't think this means much. It's an existence proof for paid subscriptions, as an important revenue source. It is not an existence proof for a paper funded primarily via subscriptions. A remarkable (maybe even exciting to some journalists) is that this represents a digital version of the print business model. It's a good thing in the sense that this promotes good content, and less hyperbole and clickbait. IDK how I feel about the desire to revive the print subcription model. The ability to share, read articles wherever they happen to be published, search the web for articles... paywalls break these. Maybe we need to go back to go forward, but this step feels like a regression... to me.

douglaswlance 8y ago

Instead of 50 professional reports, we'll have millions of independent journalists that aren't tangled in a web of multi-national conglomerate corporations. We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system. Trust in humanity's ability to adapt.

asdfman123 8y ago
That's not what's happening right now, though. What's happening right now is that people are turning to less credible news sources and are growing increasingly misinformed. It means a guy like Alex Jones can't be run out of town even if what he's saying is complete nonsense, because he can always turn to the internet. Plus, trolls funded by very well endowed state actors can now pretend to be among those "independent journalists" and completely muddy the waters. Humanity doesn't always evolve for the better. The developed world lives in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity, but don't make the mistake of believing that progress is the norm or that we've reached the end of history. It's possible to throw it all away with stupidity, propaganda, greed and infighting, and I have no doubt humanity is fully capable of reverting to that. In fact, given a long enough timeframe it's probably inevitable.
spookthesunset 8y ago
> We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system. Oh yeah, so the blockchain will somehow save this? (cough) The best "consensus" system we've got for social media / forums is the upvote / downvote and that is a horrible indicator of truthfulness / factfullness / quality of something. Upvote / downvote is only an indicator of the prevailing groupthink on any given forum -- it is not a substitute for a reality check.

conanbatt 8y ago

OTOH news has been replaced by social media, which is cheaper. I do not see this demise as a bad thing. Diversity is a goal better achieved by individuals, not by a big number of large newspapers. Also newspapers have been for a long time a business not particularly profitable on its sales, but on how its used to leverage other businesses. Failing Newspapers always find investors even if the biz is bad.

azinman2 8y ago
Social media? So just anyone with no credibility, oversight, quality control, resources, connections, or training? It’s great that individuals can funnel up stories that would otherwise be buried — but that’s no replacement for true journalism. Journalism hardly perfect, but does have a much, much higher bar.
- lenkite 8y ago
  Depends on the type of social media. I got more real news (supported by multiple corroborating facts and folks who experienced events) on the Syria Civil war from the reddit Syrian Civil war forum than the continuous propaganda published/broadcasted by the American MSM. Whenever folks published videos that were countervailing to the established narrative, Ex: modern NATO weapons in ISIS hands being used to shell civilians or the 'moderate' rebels keeping and chaining female slaves, it was just a matter of hours before the video was reported and taken down. I spent a fair amount of time verifying information. It truly opened my eyes to what 'narrative' based Journalism means. I no longer trust any of the MSM channels.
  - azinman2 8y ago
    And how do you know the sources of any of such videos? That they themselves aren’t propaganda being put out by another state actor? That’s the role of journalists.. to find such videos and verify them. To put people on the ground in Syria, fact finding and interviewing. It’s not like America is the only country with free as in speech journalism online — go read other papers if you believe the American ones are so distorted. My guess is you won’t find basic facts so challenged.