I was in New York City for hours yesterday, including a couple media events, and I can tell you there is only one conversation in New York, what will happen to the New York Times? What is the future of our business?
There is a real sense of terror around these issues, and the answers always strike me as not very interesting. I have learned to shut up during the conversation, because no one wants to hear what I have to say. And after all, I can blog about it! Here are some quick notes:
--The Times, and Newsweek and Time for that matter, and the Atlantic in its monthly cohort--they are all pursuing the same strategy: Last Man Standing. If they are the Last Man Standing, they survive profitably into the new era. My friends fault the Times for not having a more specific plan, but I don't. Who can have a secure plan in this environment? The plans of 2 years ago are meaningless today. It's the wonder and thrill of what we're experiencing. No one knows. At least the Times is trying. They have a beautiful website, everyone agrees.
--These people who are so upset about losing the Times, I always want to ask them: How much do you read the Times? How much are you getting out of the web right now!? How have your reading habits changed? Why is the 6000-word magazine piece (that put this nice roof over my head, and other great accomplishments of western civilization) to be lamented? Aren't you getting more and better information?
--When they trash the blogosphere, and the opinionizers of the web, as ill-informed, or unprofessional, or unfactchecked (a friend made that irritable criticism to me yesterday!), does the future care? As I say here often, there are more smart people writing on the web now than have ever written before. Yes there is a ton of hogwash. But people have to be discriminating. They always have. I chose to disbelieve the Jeffrey Goldberg piece on Saddam's chemical/biological weapons that got into the New Yorker before the Iraq war under the noses of the factcheckers. Readers must be smart, too.
--None of us who was paid $3 and $4 a word wants to believe that volunteer journalism, which is what is happening on the web to some degree, is all that good. Maybe we have an investment?
--I did say, to two friends, It feels so scary now. One thing we know, in two years we'll be having a different conversation. Maybe everything will be figured out then! Till then, try and be the last man standing.
What I love about newspapers is that their print versions were inexpensive, nearly functionally free. Non-advertising press were a little more expensive.
They were large enterprises to get news from source to editor to printer to reader, so there were few. They succeeded on the large capital investment comprising restrictions to entry.
That is the one change now, that there is really very limited restrictions to entry.
I think you are wrong in dismissing the absence of fact-checking or other means of selection of content or author on blogs. The public does suffer from the breakdown of the distinction between professionalism and anybodyism.
In a million fields, the web and computers have had that same effect. In my field, I've been partially replaced by computers and the web.
Consumers are not that discrimminating on the detail.
People can't tell the difference between a credible presentation, a lie, or merely a bias. So, what you get is a press that fulfills prejudices.
I expect that there will be many more publications, laid out as a newspaper (on a web page). That is clearly an enormous benefit, the ability to reference quickly, to elaborate in every direction.
(that will be the useful value adding to a newspaper, the ability to compile history in an organized manner on the fly).
So, like in New York in the 40's when there were 30 or so papers with viable circulation, each with a distinct style and editorial approach, I think something similar will happen on the web.
Hopefully there will be better journalism at different geographic and time scales, rather than the very often repetition that occurs in too many publications.
I expect there will be micro-subscriptions charged. .005/minute opened.
The problem will be revenue source. Google has a near-monopoly on web-based add revenue. While ad content in newspapers can be richer and more advantageious than in print, ad revenue is still light.
I would expect direct sales via web advertising, with publications getting in effect a commission on sales. For example, the specs of a car are easily identified via the web. An order can be placed to a NY dealer's delivery site for pickup, without a sales rep, with the commission going to the newspaper.
I'd mourn more for retailers than press.
Such a pleasure to read something from Phil that has no antisemitic content.
Een more refreshing to read something from Chris that is not dishonestly calling anyone who criticizes the IDF's annihilation of Palestinian women and children an "anti-Semite."
Great post, Phil. There is a vast fortune to be coined by the entrepreneur who cracks the code of pay-per-view internet browsing. Walter Isaacson articulated this concept in February 2009 post on HuffPo.
link to huffingtonpost.com
If I'm willing to pay a dollar for the print version of the New York Times, why wouldn't I be willing to pay at least a dollar for accessing content from all over the web? Why not an all you can eat buffet for a fixed annual price?
The Wall Street Journal Online edition is always something I'm willing to pay up for (at $49 per year if I also have the print edition, which is the only daily paper I read any longer, given the power of Google News — and my daily review of Mondoweiss, of course).
There is a per-click solution around the bend — the banner ad model is ineffective as a revenue-generation engine for content providers.
"o, what you get is a press that fulfills prejudices."
You have that now. You've always had that. The NYT reporting on some subjects is full of bias, something that anyone can recognize if they happen to have outside sources of information on a given topic. Hell, I think both leftwingers and rightwingers often have a legitimate point about NYT bias–it depends on the topic being covered. There's also such a thing as a centrist bias, where one is more concerned about giving "both sides" in a story even if the facts clearly support one side.
What the MSM has that most bloggers don't is the money to pay for reporters to go out and cover the news. That's what we'll miss, if the MSM goes under. But as for bias, that's a given.
No one that I know says that the New York Times doesn't have a perspective.
But, they admire the insistence on the professional values of good journalism, to be informative, present multiple perspectives at least as context, fact-checked.
The web doesn't guarantee that. There is too much admiration for tabloid journalism. Catchy headlines, emotional appeal, trivial political and ethical analysis.
let them all pass.who but the liars will miss the lies, deceptions, facts held, hidden, maybe released with qualifiers years later; lunatics like rosenthal, miller, safire, friedman, krauthamer, cohen, silver/goldthis, silver/goldthat, will-the-pretender, bennett, any of the fraud christians(eg cal thomas), bootlick muslims.
perish because you gave to non thieves, non war mongers nothing but lies and diminished lives and time wasted.
but you did present tons of crap for selling.
"Yes there is a ton of hogwash."
This is not unique to the web. It's just as true of the MSM, just as it's true of any university library. The only thing different about the web is that websters are willing to admit it.
Conscientious,
A lot of us are already paying $50/month just for the delivery vehicle: cable Internet access, which is $600 as an "all you can eat buffet for a fixed annual price." That's a little over $1.50 day.
The issue is paying for content that is bullshit. I, like Phil, did not buy Goldberg's New Yorker piece, and I was ridiculed at the time for not buying the kool-aid. I, however, was doing something at the time none of my friends were doing: reading foreign papers online deep into the night. Fact-checking on my own. On every so-called conspiracy site going, reading, reading, reading. Meantime, those conspiracy sites are now mainstream blogs, but they weren't then. They were pains in everyone's behind. And dismissed for the reasons Phil mentions in his post.
The issue with the NYT is that it's lied about three things: 9-11, Iraq, and Israel. Three major strikes. It does not have what would take it over the hump into the new media: trust. TIME magazine might make it because of people like Joe Klein and Tony Karon. But the NYT has taken a severe hit. Maybe not along the eastern corridor of the US, but outside of it, it's lost that elusive thing that made it The Grey Lady, that made it reputable.
And the thing, now, is that all of us can verify this for ourselves. We can now see where the NYT falls down; we can check it ourselves. Just look at the difference between what's reported here vs what's in the Times on the issue of Israel . It comes down to an editorial decision. The bias shows. It’s not “All the news that’s fit to print.” For the NYT on the subject of Israel, it’s what the uptown pro-Likud crowd finds acceptable…which ultimately makes the NYT a neighborhood rag.
I’m not going to pay $1.00/ day for that. Not when the issue of the MIddle East and Israel’s role in it is behind the major stories of the 21st C: 9-11 and Iraq.
I’d rather have a Lexis-Nexis account and read my columnists that way. I’d rather pay a subscription fee to Phil, although I have something to say about sites behind subscription fees: too many people miss the content. Maybe the subscription fee should be about the right to comment.
RE: "No one that I know says that the New York Times doesn't have a perspective.
But, they admire the insistence on the professional values of good journalism, to be informative, present multiple perspectives at least as context, fact-checked."
So that's how the NYT handled the build up to attack Iraq? That's how it has always handled
the I-P situation?
ANYONE DISAGREE WITH WITTY BESIDES ME?
Obviously, Citizen, MRW agrees. I do too, for the reasons both of you pointed out. The old lefties
tossed us the Pentagon Papers, the whole shmear on fascist USA, and rightfully so, but they
put a rubber on that prick Israel, one with a leak.
Dick, first laugh of today. Thx. (And they took out a seeing-eye dog to walk the prick around.)
Citizen, I obviously disagree with Witty. I remember the days in Manhattan when I thought whatever was in the Times was the word of God, verified, combed over, fact-checked, and run under the editor's nose 20 times if it wasn't breaking news.
Ha.
"insistence on the professional values of good journalism?" Please. That's Columbia Univ Grad J School 'Reporting 101' P.R. They just blow that idea up your ass and hope it comes out your mouth.
Another thing…
"insistence on the professional values of good journalism" also means knowing how to write a story so that everyone will think that's what you're doing: being "informative, present[ing] multiple perspectives at least as context, fact-checked."
A little segue here, another segue there, and you can fool most of the people most of the time.
I always read important stories in print from the bottom up. VERY INSTRUCTIVE.
How can you say that you disagree with me?
I NEVER stated that the NY Times was authority. I stated that it was informative.
I rely on it much more than I rely on the posts here, a third of which are or require some recanting either for fact, interpretation, or significance.
You want to be "accurately" spoonfed media. Why? Do your own thinking, from reading.
In the New York Times leading up to the Iraq War was a GREAT DEAL of discussion from multiple perspectives. To state that it was just a propaganda rag is a lie.
In the New York Times leading up to the Iraq War was a GREAT DEAL of discussion from multiple perspectives. To state that it was just a propaganda rag is a lie.
I am one person who scoured that paper and read everything about the lead-up to the Iraq War, and I can tell you from extensive verification and fact-checking that well over 60% of the articles backing the Bush admin position cited "unnamed administration officials" or "an unidentified senior intelligence officer" etcetera etcetera etcetera as source.
It wasn't only pervasive, it was pernicious.
I dont rely on blog posts for news. I read the original documents cited in the articles; at least, I search for them, and I search for more than one source to compare the PDF via ADobe Acrobat to see if there have been changes in long documents. And if its a breaking overseas story, I read the wires supplied to Xinhua, and APF, etc. That's how I knew instantly that the story about Israel taking out a nuclear site in Syria was bogus. The wire stories from boots-on-the-ground there completely contradicted the MEMRI and CAMERA-fed tales we got. That and Trish Schuh's account of actually standing on the spot where it was to have happened, and talking to US oil people who measure radioactivity daily on the Syrian-Iraqi border. (She's a Military Times reporter who couldn't get the NYT, WaPo, or HuffPo to print her stories, even when she came home and made the rounds in person. Reason? Israel Lobby.)
The NYT has no creditability.
THAT is why I dropped it.
Good riddence.
Lots of industries are changing… so much ground is shifting beneath our feet. I'm in touch with college friends through Facebook who are all pushing 50, living in NYC; they have all been through two or three careers by now, and are looking at layoffs and yet another business drying up and blowing away before their eyes.
The smartest folk seem to be the art majors who work with their hands; they make fine pottery and paintings but also melamine dinnerware or dental molds.
Everybody ought to be acquiring multiple skill sets. I may need to brush up on my sewing, who knows? I also cook, bake, and have recently begun experimenting with jam and preserves. Why are these skills less worthy than being able to write a 20 page paper on Hegel?
How's your health these days? I hope you are well.
Capitalism is largely responsible for the demise of the newspaper industry. Papers were more credible when they had foreign desks. The cost cutting that has followed "going public" has stripped so many assets. Many papers have become so beholden to their investors to turn maximum profits that they have divested themselves of what had made them valuable. I used to rely on certain papers for valuable insight that I now find online. I search news on several continents and have become a DEMANDING READER.
You guys HAVE to check out 'State of Play'… the new film with Ben Affleck and Russel Crowe.
This theme is spelled out in depth, and points to what Phil has been saying here:
"It's about the content"
if you don't have the whole story, then your newspaper isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
So when's the big story coming out on Zionism and Imperial collusion?
In Canada, Lord Thomson of Fleet was responsible for buying up all the local town rags and
replacing them with boilerplate news. Here's some info on him, and his son, and now his son's son:
link to cbc.ca
PS: Thomson owns West Publishing, responsible for the West Key system, the main resource for
searching US legal content.
Never heard this stuff mentioned in the USA Press.
Hmmm. Didn't realize Thomson bought West. Ken is the one who sold everything to Asper, no?
The NY Times downfall actually started quite along time ago with Herman and Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent", IMO.
The film of the same name probably more so…