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GE buys out entire NYT print paper in historic first
- cocacola1 4y agoFor a moment, I thought GE had bought the print division of the NYT.
- he_is_legend 4y ago"Buys out" and "owns" apparently now mean the same as "rent for a small period of time" ...
- shadowofneptune 4y agoIt's the physical bits of page space in reader's hands, in this case. The usage is pretty common for print ads.
- vineyardmike 4y agoIt’s common to say buying ad space. You have probably regularly heard an advertiser “buying a full page”. No one’s ever “bought” the whole thing, so the confusing language of saying “buy” in this context never came up before.
- coldpie 4y agoI thought either this, or GE provided all of the content for an entire issue. I don't think I've read more than one or two physical newspapers in my entire life (I'm 34), so maybe "buy out" is some term of industry I'm not familiar with that makes sense to others who do read newspapers?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoDying company bets big on print media advertising. Nice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jaywalk 4y agoIn what way is GE a dying company?
- phone8675309 4y agoBy every conceivable metric, including culturally
- FourHand451 4y agoCan you say more about these metrics, for those of us who don't know?
- trident5000 4y agoidk about culturally but financially theyve been decimated from their former self. It was a very large conglomerate and they strategically kept certain parts and spun off others so there probably is a resilient business or two in there somewhere but it will mostly likely always be a shadow of its former self.
- JamesSwift 4y agoAll I know is, a bunch of former GE people came over to a former company and basically tanked our engineering department. The engineers that migrated were successful overall (not 100% good hires, but definitely more than 50%), but all of the management that switched were terrible. It doesnt help that one of those managers also took over the Director of Engineering position, so had an outsized impact.
- lantry 4y agoHow about the price of their stock? If you bought their stock any time after 1997 you've lost money on that trade link to price chart: https://g.co/kgs/rsz5vj https://g.co/kgs/rsz5vj
- moloch-hai 4y agoOne wonders what non-coverage GE is really buying. I.e., what story did they really, really want to have spiked? (Or, more likely, never green-lit?) Amazon had to buy the WP outright.
- pjc50 4y agoIndeed. I'm reminded of Peter Oborne: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t... (a surprisingly similar situation to things people say about FTX, but with traditional banking and money laundering)
- vnchr 4y ago> The paper will be delivered Tuesday to The Times' 330,000 weekday print subscribers, and will also be available on newsstands. 330k subscribers on Twitter would be..what, a D-list influencer? I think of NYT as the preeminent newspaper of America. Granted, we're talking quantity versus quality. It's still jarring to consider the audience of individuals versus a media conglomerate nowadays.
- thatguy0900 4y agoHalf of those subs will be bots and another 25% will have forgot they even subbed to that person. Very different from paying real money every month.
- leejoramo 4y agoAnd the NYT subscriptions go to Households, Offices, Waiting Rooms where the number of readers is greater than the number of subscribers
- bombcar 4y agoThis is the real situation - you can see it most obviously in the view count of Youtube personalities that may still have millions of subscribers but only 10k+ views on their latest videos. Even if half the NYT papers go directly into the recycling without being opened, that's still going to be a larger reach than similar-counted twitters.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Half of those subs will be bots and another 25% will have forgot they even subbed to that person. Very different from paying real money every month. Also you can expect newspaper subscribers are paying a lot of attention to the paper's article, while a follower may be barely paying attention to any account they follow. Additionally, newspaper articles probably drive a lot of tweets in ways that are difficult to measure fully.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- brainchild-adam 4y agoHm. On the one hand, I find this pretty cool. A singular-focus media campaign, and from what I read one that could actually provide some educational and entertainment value. Might be a good step by GE in terms of managing brand awareness and identity. At the same time I'm a bit concerned by the influence advertisers and their interests have on media in general. Catering to advertisers does not always seem to align with the possibly more intrinsic goals and values of a newspaper, for example. Or what I would want from a newspaper.
- h11h 4y agoThis has been a concern since at least the 80s, when Manufacturing Consent discussed this very problem. The good news is that the New York Times is making a much higher proportion of its revenue from readers (thanks to the growth in digital subscriptions), while advertising revenue is much lower than it used to be, so, whatever effect it did have, it should be less now.
- smcnally 4y agoIt’s been a concern at least since the 1780s https://adverts250project.org/tag/benjamin-franklin/ https://adverts250project.org/tag/benjamin-franklin/
- philwelch 4y agoGood news is that the NYT doesn’t get biased by the ulterior motive of depending on advertisers for revenue. Bad news is that the NYT does get biased by the ulterior motive of pandering to their subscribers.
- leejoramo 4y agoReminds me of Apple’s November 1984 buyout of Newsweek. It was hyper focused on showing people the original Macintosh, mostly to people who had never consider the need for a computer. Very different to GE trying to explain why a troubled but long standing NYSE conglomerate is unbundling itself. Here is the full copy of Apple’s Newsweek buyout https://archive.org/details/Newsweek-1984-Macintosh-brochure/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Newsweek-1984-Macintosh-brochure... And yes. Apple did advertise in a week they knew would have a huge print run.
- xrayarx 4y agoThey bought all the ad space in one edition, they didn’t buy the printing business or any other part of the NYT
- sbergot 4y agofunny story. I used to live in a medium sized city in France. The mayor once bought all the prints of a satirical journal the day they published a story about corruption in this city. You would think that it would be easy to do a reprint but some shops were too afraid to buy those again. The mayor is still in charge of the city. article in french: https://www.elle.fr/Societe/News/Puteaux-la-maire-a-fait-acheter-tous-les-Canard-enchaine-1773912 https://www.elle.fr/Societe/News/Puteaux-la-maire-a-fait-ach...
- nathanaldensr 4y agoSorry, but why should I be excited about this?
- 1letterunixname 4y agoTo prove your loyalty and faith as a good consumer.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoAnd thanks to ublock origin and the steven black hosts list, I won't see a single one of GE's NYT ads, or pretty much any other ads from anyone, anywhere. Life is good! [EDIT: although the HN title doesn't convey it, GE also bought out "most of [the NYT's] premier digital advertising real estate." ]
- mastax 4y agoIf you read the article, you got the message of GE's ads anyway.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoI read the opening para, got the message that GE was the exclusive advertiser in one edition of the NYT, and then stopped.
- brewdad 4y agoAnd you thought about GE today, possibly for the first time in months, so the scheme worked.
- soupfordummies 4y agoIt's too late, it's already inside you :(
- thunderbong 4y agoHow did you use uBlock origin with Steven block hosts list on the print paper?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThey combine with an ancient technique called "not reading it that way".
- charles_f 4y agoI thought, reading the title, that GE had bought the entirety of NYT, but it sounds like they only bought the entirety of their advertising space for one issue. Is "print paper" a common term for advertising space?
- ryukoposting 4y agoWe're talking about GE and their efforts to turn a big, inefficient company into smaller, more efficient companies. In that sense, this ad campaign is already an overwhelming success.
- jrochkind1 4y agoI coincidentally happen to be staying as a guest at a house that gets NYT print delivered every morning... and I spent a good 30 minutes reading it this morning (reading a print paper is still a pleasure even though I don't do it much; lots of interesting articles in Business today)... And I totally didn't notice. Shows how much attention I give to the ads I guess. When I saw this here on HN, I thought wait, really? Went to look at the paper -- yup, I just didn't notice. What an odd coincidence that I happened to have a print NYT on hand when I saw this on HN.
- cardiffspaceman 4y agoI thought they bought all the printed copies for some reason, so your comment really helped me figure out what the headline was trying to say.
- soupfordummies 4y agoReminds me of this, which was posted here a month or so ago: Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33220801
- 1letterunixname 4y agoThe triumphalism of corporate greed passes for "news" at "the paper of record". That should give pause rather than congratulations.
- lesuorac 4y agoI guess they had to spent their now-$0 Twitter budget somewhere.
- djohnston 4y agoIt's nice to see the dinosaurs banding together.