Maybe NPR/PBS will become the dominant online news sources, since they don't have to worry about the advertising question at all. Thus turning them into a BBC-style outfit.
tracking how many viewers have blocked out their ads
Hmm. I think Adblock can be set to load and not show or simply not load ads. If you're not loading, then they can tell that the page has been loaded, but that a particular image has not; but if you're loading and not showing, I don't see how they could tell.
Yeah, that's the thing. The Republicans already hate CPB, I'm sure that would only become more pronounced as public broadcasting becomes more influencial. Maybe institutional affiliation could do it (The New York Times, brought to you by Harvard University).
3: It wouldn't be hard to figure out. Unique impressions on the page - unique impressions of the ad = the number of blockers. Unless you're configured to do what ogged outlines, in which case, no, there's no way for them to tell.
Re the larger question: like in the music industry, I think things will work themselves out. We just need to finish what AP started. Honestly, I don't think there's that much value in having hundreds of slightly different versions of the same wire service story.
I suspect that op-ed, arts and metro sections will contract into city-specific versions of Slate. The Times and the Post could trim down to the things they do that no one else does, then license out their content.
I've got a pretty slow connection, so my Adblock is set to do-not-load. I guess that means that my click-throughs get Gary Farber no BlogAds love.
I tend to the apocalyptic about the current content for advertisement system. Network TV is also scrambling. I don't really know what an effective financing system will look like for news reporting. I hope it doesn't look like membership drives.
We all like to rag on the Times, but if it, and papers like it, go away or scale way back, boy will we miss them.
Disagree entirely. There are probably eight stories in the NYT that the average reader reads per day. The rest, for most people, is filler. Fewer newspapers will mean clearer options for potential readers, which in turn means greater competition, leading to newspapers that actually do a good job rather than simply coasting for decades on their name.
If there are four national newspapers in the country, and the rest of the newspapers scale back to focus on local issues, how much are you hurt?
Does Slate actually make money? I wasn't sure if it was one of thise "invest in the future" kind of plans by the Post. Though not needing a physical newsroom is probably a money saver.
I'm totally with SCMT. I suddenly realized at some point in 2003 that my commitment to the idea that Educated People Read the NYT had eroded to the point where a puff could blow it away. So I puffed, and it went. I listen to BBC Radio 4 through the internets, some NPR, and read the occasional blog (no, really? -- ed. Down, K@us-device!) and feel reasonably informed without ever once enduring the great grey lady's chilly self-regard.
To put words in ogged's mouth, I don't think it's the news-publishing function of the NYT we'd miss, but rather the news-gathering function. And since they pay for the news-gathering with the news-publishing, if no one's buying, they'll stop reporting.
I don't think the NYT style section is a vital national treasure, but I think there are aspects of a world-class journalistic enterprise that we'd miss.
As a side thought, are magazines in a similar pinch? I think many of them only put some content online, and make you get a paper copy for all the goods (the New Yorker, for instance). Could that be a model for newspapers? Or will news magazines take over?
If they trimmed and focused on actually being world class in the areas that we cared about, we'd be willing to pay for it. Moreover, in a world with only four national newspapers, we're talking about Google-sized ad servage for those papers.
SCMT--we'd be willing to pay for the areas we care about. But would that sustain a company that was able to do actual reporting on Washington, foreign policy, scandals around the country, etc.? I'm not sure--I don't know if they wouldn't just be aced out of the market by rich crazy people subsidizing coverage that slants the way they want (and finds a ready-made audience).
We're conflating, I suspect, two problems that the newspaper industry faces:
1. People who get their news for free, without even looking at the ads.
2. People who no longer read newspapers at all.
If there's enough demand, there will be sufficient supply. If not that many people want foreign coverage, then there won't be much foreign coverage. Or you'll have to buy it from specialty mags who are more likely to know what they're talking about. The nitty-gritty will be the execution, and maybe the Times won't be one of the organizations to work it out. But over time it will work itself out.
But the solutions I'm hearing really will put us all into echo-chambers. If the only news I get to read is the news I pay for, and making the safe assumption that I'm only going to pay for news from a perspective that's congenial, then I'll hear far fewer dissenting voices (or the voices I do hear--bloggers, for example, will sound crazy, because we'll be working for an even more different set of facts).
... I don't think it's the news-publishing function of the NYT we'd miss, but rather the news-gathering function.
Fair enough, but it's worth pointing out that this is getting much cheaper. Not to indulge in out-and-out blog triumphalism, but the internet makes it very easy and cheap to collect information about what's going on in societies that are sufficiently wired. I don't think one can overstate the significance of that front page camera phone shot of the London bombings.
You're not talking about the loss of a newspaper, you're talking about the loss of ... an epistemic market(?), where we hash out what are the Important Ideas and Beliefs that the Smart Set will have to reconcile. Which, I admit, is precisely how the NYT functions. (See Halberstam, The Powers That Be.) And if it does a more credible job of it, it'll continue to function as such for a long while.
Aw, but who's "we", there? It's an acrid whiff of bourgeois rectitude, that "all the news that's fit to print", ain't it? One that's lately shaded into a powerful stench of mendacity.
For all the hate the "we interviewed two friends and one random guy on the street, and based on that, this is a trend" stories the more fluffish pieces in the NYTs get, they seem to work pretty well to me. They coordinate to some degree the conversations going on in the various blog cliques - it's fun to click through and see everyone angry about them for different reasons. Things like Dowd's recent piece are not supposed to be well researched sociological studies, but conversation starters.
Really, I just wrote this comment because I wanted to tell Apo that !!eleven!!was awesome, but felt weird just saying that.
#22: It's not me. The angry God of American Virtue demands as tribute the life of an acquiecent institution. The DLC, the NYT, TNR, or Hillary's Presidential ambitions - pick one and get back to me.
(But seriously, it bothers me when the market doesn't punish institutions for being badly wrong about everything.)
w/r/t the echo chamber problem -- it's trite to say, but we're already there. How many elites do you think have the kind of access that offers an advantage the public doesn't have?
Is blogging really going to put the Bob Woodwards of the world out of a job? While we're at it, how many of the white house correspondents in the press room actually contribute anything?
The primary documents will be available for free. Video feeds, transcripts, reports, whatever. I really that amateur journalism can go a long way.
We'll lose the long-form investigative pieces, I suppose, but we were already losing those.
Dan Gillmor in We the Media asserts that Big Media will remain because of the importance of investigative reporting, which multiple people above have noted is the main thing we'd miss if the Times and similar papers continue to die out.
In the first six chapters, (which is all I read yesterday, and thank god, because it turned out Balkin had taken it off of our syllabus during a time period when I was not in the classroom) the mechanism through which Big Media will keep providing this isn't explained, and worries about Craig's List and E-Bay eating into classified and other advertising revenues are mentioned. However, let me suggest that the reason no mechanism is mentioned is because the Times has no trouble at all making a profit (Gillmor We The Media, xv, "Big Media enjoys high margins. Daily newspapers in typical quasi-monopoloy markets make 25-30 percent or more in good years." He doesn't provide a citation for that claim.) we the media , though it does have some trouble making a constantly increasing amount of profit. But as a privately held company, it doesn't have to do that.
As a personal note, the only reason I give the Times money is because I don't have an online crossword account and much prefer doing the crossword by hand anyway.
Also, I don't have a Firefox adblocker extension, I just use the function which initially came with it and is controlled under "Tools", "Options", "Web Features." Should I get this extension? I still see ads very rarely.
This is really ogged's usually submerged conservatism coming out. It's only a matter of time before he makes "The Ashes of Our Fathers, The Temples of our Gods" the blog motto.
Slol: you're right, there is a significant class aspect to this. Which I wouldn't mind so much if the NYT could read its fucking market properly.
Ogged: it'll be one of the four national newspapers, it'll have in-page ads, and it'll make money that way. How many times do you notice the ads in a dead tree paper anyway?
ONLINE, THE TIMES ALREADY is making serious money. New York Times Digital (which includes Boston.com as well as NYTimes.com) netted an enviable $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004, the last period for which its financials have been disclosed. All indications are that the digital unit is continuing to grow at 30% to 40% a year, making it NYT Co.'s fastest-revving growth engine.
Adding to w/d's comment, from the first article I linked,
It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."
The people who track this stuff for a living point out that
(1) this has (mostly) very little to do with the internet. Sales of newspapers have been falling (in a growing population) for twenty five years
(2) the primary problem with newspapers is that they are producing a product that is absolutely irrelevant to would-be-reader's lives. They refuse to put background material in stories, insist on a vast array of bizarre conventions in how stories are written that make no sense to the average person, pretend to be "objective" even though it's obvious to anyone with a brain that this is being exploited by politicians, reprint any random crap that gets fed them by the RNC as though it's earth-shattering news, refuse to call a spade a spade even in the cases of obvious lies, and THEY MISS THE MOST IMPORTANT STORIES --- like how there were no WMD --- the WH is not the only group who still haven't apologized about that.
OK, so how about another data point. A book by Lewis Lapham on money in America pointed out that more Fortune 400 fortunes arose from media than any other industry.
Conclusion: The existing press is interested in only one thing --- acting as cheerleaders for US capitalism and everything that goes along with it. The population, however, is well aware of this. In a functioning capitalist system, this would lead to competitors arising who actually give the people what they want. I've no idea if this would happen in the US, but I suspect it can't happen until the existing big news and their fortune 400 dollars are greatly humbled, opening up a spot for their competitors.
I've no idea how many-fold strong we are, but I would pay for a news source that didn't suck. I paid for _The Economist_ for maybe ten years, until the amount of bullshit praising GWB and the Republicans was so high that I lost confidence in the truth of anything else they printed. That doesn't mean the format has to be daily newspaper --- many of the pathologies of existing newspapers are precisely because of the daily format and its attendant obsession with scoops and lack of interesting in background.
I cancelled my NY Times subscription when the carrier started leaving the paper outside my building rather than in front of my door, because I found myself reading it online before getting dressed and then throwing it out when I finally got downstairs. That must have been about 2001.
I bought the online subscription because I feel bad about not paying them.
I miss the ads, particularly Harry's and Tip Top Shoes. And I'm sure I read only 1/3 of the articles I used to read. I use the extra time to read the Washington Post, the LA Times, Le Monde, and blogs, though.
Being from the Internet advertising world, I like to think of myself as having some expertise in this business of making money with content. And I have given the matter of the Times some thought. In my essaylet below: substitute [your favorite newspaper] for where I say Times and substitute [your favorite search engine] where I say Google. Some of what I say might sound like the Internet triumphalism of the 90s, but the reality is that Google is making real revenues not fake.
There is a burgeoning business in giving content away for free. The biggest driver of this business has been, of course, Google. Most of us know Google as a great search engine. But Google is also something else: a great targeter of ads. Google is consistenyly able to show ads to the right people on the right content pages. And they keep getting better at it. One of the things Google is just figuring out is: how to attract local merchants to advertise in their system (think auto dealers, real estate agents etc, the major drivers of print revenues). When (not if) Google figures it out, your online newspaper will begin to look very much like your paper version. Excellent content with well targeted ads for whatever you're looking for. Only much better interface.
The Times will of couse have to change how they do things to exploit this. For instance: the search engines have to be able to find their articles and rank them more easily. Also: they'll have to tailor their content presentation more for the web. Understand that on the web, where copy-paste is so easy people might be willing to pay for today's news, but sure as hell won't pay for yesterday's or last weeks. But here's the bonus: yesterday's news does not have to be accompanied by yesterday's ad. It will be accompanied by the latest ad (so you still make revenue on those impressions). Obviously depending on ad dollars every impression could lead them to focus more on Britney Spears and her comings and goings rather than Alan Greenspan. Or they could be like Yahoo News and let people personalize what they want to see. Also they might actually start demanding that their Op-Ed guys write stuff that people will want to read.
I've been wrestling with this issue for a decade, but from the content side. I've come to a couple of conclusions:
-- The kinds of profit margins that newspapers (particularly in monopoly markets, which is most of them) have enjoyed in the past few decades are simply not supportable long-term. There are several reasons for that. 1) The barriers to entry, which used to be measured at $15 million for a printing press just to start, now look more like $10K for a decent Sun Web server; 2) Lots of news, or news-like information, already is available for free; 3) The most worthwhile thing most local papers could supply that no one else could -- investigative and watchdog journalism specific to their market -- is about the most labor-intensive (and, therefore, expensive) thing newspapers do.
Problem is, most media-company execs either are in denial about this or are just trying to keep the margins propped up until they can retire in a few years. No one is planning and investing in ways that will lead to a graceful transition to a lower, but sustainable, profit margin with a primarily online, rather than print-based, product.
I actually love the New York Times. I've been reading it for over twenty years. Yet I don't subscribe to Times Select, and doubt I ever will. I think the approach they took is wrong. They put their most influential (and most read) material behind the subscription wall. That's the part that should be free.
Instead of making you pay for what was free, they should offer something better for a price. I would gladly pay for Times Select if it was a totally ad-free version of their paper. I would do the same for the Washington Post.
The BBC model has been mentioned, and it might work -- but probably not in a culture as toxically obsessed with laissez faire free market cannibalistic capitalism as America.
Maybe an open-source version of the BBC. What about starting a giant pool of contributions online to pay for a staff of dedicated professionals like the Washinton Post?
The problem with this is that it assumes most folks who surf the net aren't freeloaders. But, as the web shows, most folks who surf the net _are_ freeloadrs. The typical response of the typical websurfer is: gimme. Gimme free mp3s. Gimme free pics. Gimme free porn. Gimme free journalism.
When you study the 50% of the population of America that surfs the web, you realize it's an endless parade of hundreds of millions of panhandlers, all with their hands out, staring into your eyes with a hard impudent glare, yelling: "Gimme!"
Unfortunately, that's not a population likely to support any substantive poublic institution, be it the ny times or the Washington Post. You can poll all the panhandlers in America, and without exception you'll find that not one of 'em donates to the Chicago Symphony or the National Institute of Health or the Sierra Club.
So most likely, reputable news organizations are going away, and they'll be replaced by Drudge and Faux Noose. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth. Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia...
Maybe NPR/PBS will become the dominant online news sources, since they don't have to worry about the advertising question at all. Thus turning them into a BBC-style outfit.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:32 PM
Maybe, but can you imagine politicians in the U.S. leaving them alone if they mattered any more than they do?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:33 PM
a lot of you use Firefox, with, I bet, the Adblock extension, so you don't even see the ads.
You got me. Does anyone know whether the advertisers have ways of tracking how many viewers have blocked out their ads?
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:34 PM
tracking how many viewers have blocked out their ads
Hmm. I think Adblock can be set to load and not show or simply not load ads. If you're not loading, then they can tell that the page has been loaded, but that a particular image has not; but if you're loading and not showing, I don't see how they could tell.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:37 PM
Yeah, that's the thing. The Republicans already hate CPB, I'm sure that would only become more pronounced as public broadcasting becomes more influencial. Maybe institutional affiliation could do it (The New York Times, brought to you by Harvard University).
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:38 PM
3: It wouldn't be hard to figure out. Unique impressions on the page - unique impressions of the ad = the number of blockers. Unless you're configured to do what ogged outlines, in which case, no, there's no way for them to tell.
Re the larger question: like in the music industry, I think things will work themselves out. We just need to finish what AP started. Honestly, I don't think there's that much value in having hundreds of slightly different versions of the same wire service story.
I suspect that op-ed, arts and metro sections will contract into city-specific versions of Slate. The Times and the Post could trim down to the things they do that no one else does, then license out their content.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:42 PM
I've got a pretty slow connection, so my Adblock is set to do-not-load. I guess that means that my click-throughs get Gary Farber no BlogAds love.
I tend to the apocalyptic about the current content for advertisement system. Network TV is also scrambling. I don't really know what an effective financing system will look like for news reporting. I hope it doesn't look like membership drives.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:45 PM
We all like to rag on the Times, but if it, and papers like it, go away or scale way back, boy will we miss them.
Disagree entirely. There are probably eight stories in the NYT that the average reader reads per day. The rest, for most people, is filler. Fewer newspapers will mean clearer options for potential readers, which in turn means greater competition, leading to newspapers that actually do a good job rather than simply coasting for decades on their name.
If there are four national newspapers in the country, and the rest of the newspapers scale back to focus on local issues, how much are you hurt?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:45 PM
Does Slate actually make money? I wasn't sure if it was one of thise "invest in the future" kind of plans by the Post. Though not needing a physical newsroom is probably a money saver.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:46 PM
I'm totally with SCMT. I suddenly realized at some point in 2003 that my commitment to the idea that Educated People Read the NYT had eroded to the point where a puff could blow it away. So I puffed, and it went. I listen to BBC Radio 4 through the internets, some NPR, and read the occasional blog (no, really? -- ed. Down, K@us-device!) and feel reasonably informed without ever once enduring the great grey lady's chilly self-regard.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:55 PM
Screw the New York Times. We have Open Pajamas Media now!!eleven!!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:56 PM
To put words in ogged's mouth, I don't think it's the news-publishing function of the NYT we'd miss, but rather the news-gathering function. And since they pay for the news-gathering with the news-publishing, if no one's buying, they'll stop reporting.
I don't think the NYT style section is a vital national treasure, but I think there are aspects of a world-class journalistic enterprise that we'd miss.
As a side thought, are magazines in a similar pinch? I think many of them only put some content online, and make you get a paper copy for all the goods (the New Yorker, for instance). Could that be a model for newspapers? Or will news magazines take over?
Posted by Matt #3 | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:56 PM
Maybe institutional affiliation could do it (The New York Times, brought to you by Harvard University).
The Washington Time, brought to you by the Unification Church!
The New York Post, brought to you by Rupert Murdoch!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:57 PM
Matt:
If they trimmed and focused on actually being world class in the areas that we cared about, we'd be willing to pay for it. Moreover, in a world with only four national newspapers, we're talking about Google-sized ad servage for those papers.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 2:59 PM
The Mineshaft, brought to you by Unfogged!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:00 PM
Auto-sponsorism will make us go blind. Surely we can find backing somewhere else.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:03 PM
SCMT--we'd be willing to pay for the areas we care about. But would that sustain a company that was able to do actual reporting on Washington, foreign policy, scandals around the country, etc.? I'm not sure--I don't know if they wouldn't just be aced out of the market by rich crazy people subsidizing coverage that slants the way they want (and finds a ready-made audience).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:04 PM
We're conflating, I suspect, two problems that the newspaper industry faces:
1. People who get their news for free, without even looking at the ads.
2. People who no longer read newspapers at all.
If there's enough demand, there will be sufficient supply. If not that many people want foreign coverage, then there won't be much foreign coverage. Or you'll have to buy it from specialty mags who are more likely to know what they're talking about. The nitty-gritty will be the execution, and maybe the Times won't be one of the organizations to work it out. But over time it will work itself out.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:11 PM
But over time it will work itself out.
But the solutions I'm hearing really will put us all into echo-chambers. If the only news I get to read is the news I pay for, and making the safe assumption that I'm only going to pay for news from a perspective that's congenial, then I'll hear far fewer dissenting voices (or the voices I do hear--bloggers, for example, will sound crazy, because we'll be working for an even more different set of facts).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:16 PM
actually being world class in the areas that we cared about
The key words here are general interest, which means big readership, which means institutional power, which means calls get answered.
Nobody except Scooter Libby cares what the New Republic says.
Posted by Andy Vance | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:16 PM
Nobody at all should care about what the New Republic says.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:22 PM
The messy breakup is showing, SCMT.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:23 PM
... I don't think it's the news-publishing function of the NYT we'd miss, but rather the news-gathering function.
Fair enough, but it's worth pointing out that this is getting much cheaper. Not to indulge in out-and-out blog triumphalism, but the internet makes it very easy and cheap to collect information about what's going on in societies that are sufficiently wired. I don't think one can overstate the significance of that front page camera phone shot of the London bombings.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:25 PM
Ogged:
You're not talking about the loss of a newspaper, you're talking about the loss of ... an epistemic market(?), where we hash out what are the Important Ideas and Beliefs that the Smart Set will have to reconcile. Which, I admit, is precisely how the NYT functions. (See Halberstam, The Powers That Be.) And if it does a more credible job of it, it'll continue to function as such for a long while.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:26 PM
where we hash out what are the Important Ideas and Beliefs that the Smart Set will have to reconcile
Right.
it'll continue to function as such for a long while
But how will it make money?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:28 PM
where we hash out what are the Important Ideas
Aw, but who's "we", there? It's an acrid whiff of bourgeois rectitude, that "all the news that's fit to print", ain't it? One that's lately shaded into a powerful stench of mendacity.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:30 PM
For all the hate the "we interviewed two friends and one random guy on the street, and based on that, this is a trend" stories the more fluffish pieces in the NYTs get, they seem to work pretty well to me. They coordinate to some degree the conversations going on in the various blog cliques - it's fun to click through and see everyone angry about them for different reasons. Things like Dowd's recent piece are not supposed to be well researched sociological studies, but conversation starters.
Really, I just wrote this comment because I wanted to tell Apo that !!eleven!!was awesome, but felt weird just saying that.
Posted by oztk | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:30 PM
#22: It's not me. The angry God of American Virtue demands as tribute the life of an acquiecent institution. The DLC, the NYT, TNR, or Hillary's Presidential ambitions - pick one and get back to me.
(But seriously, it bothers me when the market doesn't punish institutions for being badly wrong about everything.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:31 PM
w/r/t the echo chamber problem -- it's trite to say, but we're already there. How many elites do you think have the kind of access that offers an advantage the public doesn't have?
Is blogging really going to put the Bob Woodwards of the world out of a job? While we're at it, how many of the white house correspondents in the press room actually contribute anything?
The primary documents will be available for free. Video feeds, transcripts, reports, whatever. I really that amateur journalism can go a long way.
We'll lose the long-form investigative pieces, I suppose, but we were already losing those.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:33 PM
really that > really think that
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:38 PM
Dan Gillmor in We the Media asserts that Big Media will remain because of the importance of investigative reporting, which multiple people above have noted is the main thing we'd miss if the Times and similar papers continue to die out.
In the first six chapters, (which is all I read yesterday, and thank god, because it turned out Balkin had taken it off of our syllabus during a time period when I was not in the classroom) the mechanism through which Big Media will keep providing this isn't explained, and worries about Craig's List and E-Bay eating into classified and other advertising revenues are mentioned. However, let me suggest that the reason no mechanism is mentioned is because the Times has no trouble at all making a profit (Gillmor We The Media, xv, "Big Media enjoys high margins. Daily newspapers in typical quasi-monopoloy markets make 25-30 percent or more in good years." He doesn't provide a citation for that claim.) we the media , though it does have some trouble making a constantly increasing amount of profit. But as a privately held company, it doesn't have to do that.
As a personal note, the only reason I give the Times money is because I don't have an online crossword account and much prefer doing the crossword by hand anyway.
Also, I don't have a Firefox adblocker extension, I just use the function which initially came with it and is controlled under "Tools", "Options", "Web Features." Should I get this extension? I still see ads very rarely.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:42 PM
This is really ogged's usually submerged conservatism coming out. It's only a matter of time before he makes "The Ashes of Our Fathers, The Temples of our Gods" the blog motto.
Slol: you're right, there is a significant class aspect to this. Which I wouldn't mind so much if the NYT could read its fucking market properly.
Ogged: it'll be one of the four national newspapers, it'll have in-page ads, and it'll make money that way. How many times do you notice the ads in a dead tree paper anyway?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 3:52 PM
How many times do you notice the ads in a dead tree paper anyway?
Every damned Sunday. The Arts and Entertainment section seems to be made up almost entirely of full-page, color ads for movies or broadway plays.
31--the crossword is what you steal your neighbor's paper for...
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 4:01 PM
Also:
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 4:22 PM
I don't have anything to add, but these two articles look relevant, too:
The End of News and The Press: The Enemy Within".
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 4:30 PM
In 31, extra appearance of "we the media" s/b ""
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 4:40 PM
Adding to w/d's comment, from the first article I linked,
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 5:06 PM
The people who track this stuff for a living point out that
(1) this has (mostly) very little to do with the internet. Sales of newspapers have been falling (in a growing population) for twenty five years
(2) the primary problem with newspapers is that they are producing a product that is absolutely irrelevant to would-be-reader's lives. They refuse to put background material in stories, insist on a vast array of bizarre conventions in how stories are written that make no sense to the average person, pretend to be "objective" even though it's obvious to anyone with a brain that this is being exploited by politicians, reprint any random crap that gets fed them by the RNC as though it's earth-shattering news, refuse to call a spade a spade even in the cases of obvious lies, and THEY MISS THE MOST IMPORTANT STORIES --- like how there were no WMD --- the WH is not the only group who still haven't apologized about that.
OK, so how about another data point. A book by Lewis Lapham on money in America pointed out that more Fortune 400 fortunes arose from media than any other industry.
Conclusion: The existing press is interested in only one thing --- acting as cheerleaders for US capitalism and everything that goes along with it. The population, however, is well aware of this. In a functioning capitalist system, this would lead to competitors arising who actually give the people what they want. I've no idea if this would happen in the US, but I suspect it can't happen until the existing big news and their fortune 400 dollars are greatly humbled, opening up a spot for their competitors.
I've no idea how many-fold strong we are, but I would pay for a news source that didn't suck. I paid for _The Economist_ for maybe ten years, until the amount of bullshit praising GWB and the Republicans was so high that I lost confidence in the truth of anything else they printed. That doesn't mean the format has to be daily newspaper --- many of the pathologies of existing newspapers are precisely because of the daily format and its attendant obsession with scoops and lack of interesting in background.
Posted by Maynard Handley | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 7:04 PM
I cancelled my NY Times subscription when the carrier started leaving the paper outside my building rather than in front of my door, because I found myself reading it online before getting dressed and then throwing it out when I finally got downstairs. That must have been about 2001.
I bought the online subscription because I feel bad about not paying them.
I miss the ads, particularly Harry's and Tip Top Shoes. And I'm sure I read only 1/3 of the articles I used to read. I use the extra time to read the Washington Post, the LA Times, Le Monde, and blogs, though.
Posted by Shamhat | Link to this comment | 11-22-05 7:22 PM
Being from the Internet advertising world, I like to think of myself as having some expertise in this business of making money with content. And I have given the matter of the Times some thought. In my essaylet below: substitute [your favorite newspaper] for where I say Times and substitute [your favorite search engine] where I say Google. Some of what I say might sound like the Internet triumphalism of the 90s, but the reality is that Google is making real revenues not fake.
There is a burgeoning business in giving content away for free. The biggest driver of this business has been, of course, Google. Most of us know Google as a great search engine. But Google is also something else: a great targeter of ads. Google is consistenyly able to show ads to the right people on the right content pages. And they keep getting better at it. One of the things Google is just figuring out is: how to attract local merchants to advertise in their system (think auto dealers, real estate agents etc, the major drivers of print revenues). When (not if) Google figures it out, your online newspaper will begin to look very much like your paper version. Excellent content with well targeted ads for whatever you're looking for. Only much better interface.
The Times will of couse have to change how they do things to exploit this. For instance: the search engines have to be able to find their articles and rank them more easily. Also: they'll have to tailor their content presentation more for the web. Understand that on the web, where copy-paste is so easy people might be willing to pay for today's news, but sure as hell won't pay for yesterday's or last weeks. But here's the bonus: yesterday's news does not have to be accompanied by yesterday's ad. It will be accompanied by the latest ad (so you still make revenue on those impressions). Obviously depending on ad dollars every impression could lead them to focus more on Britney Spears and her comings and goings rather than Alan Greenspan. Or they could be like Yahoo News and let people personalize what they want to see. Also they might actually start demanding that their Op-Ed guys write stuff that people will want to read.
Posted by wi | Link to this comment | 11-23-05 10:31 AM
I've been wrestling with this issue for a decade, but from the content side. I've come to a couple of conclusions:
-- The kinds of profit margins that newspapers (particularly in monopoly markets, which is most of them) have enjoyed in the past few decades are simply not supportable long-term. There are several reasons for that. 1) The barriers to entry, which used to be measured at $15 million for a printing press just to start, now look more like $10K for a decent Sun Web server; 2) Lots of news, or news-like information, already is available for free; 3) The most worthwhile thing most local papers could supply that no one else could -- investigative and watchdog journalism specific to their market -- is about the most labor-intensive (and, therefore, expensive) thing newspapers do.
Problem is, most media-company execs either are in denial about this or are just trying to keep the margins propped up until they can retire in a few years. No one is planning and investing in ways that will lead to a graceful transition to a lower, but sustainable, profit margin with a primarily online, rather than print-based, product.
Posted by Lex | Link to this comment | 11-23-05 10:54 AM
I actually love the New York Times. I've been reading it for over twenty years. Yet I don't subscribe to Times Select, and doubt I ever will. I think the approach they took is wrong. They put their most influential (and most read) material behind the subscription wall. That's the part that should be free.
Instead of making you pay for what was free, they should offer something better for a price. I would gladly pay for Times Select if it was a totally ad-free version of their paper. I would do the same for the Washington Post.
Posted by shoobee | Link to this comment | 11-24-05 11:43 AM
The BBC model has been mentioned, and it might work -- but probably not in a culture as toxically obsessed with laissez faire free market cannibalistic capitalism as America.
Maybe an open-source version of the BBC. What about starting a giant pool of contributions online to pay for a staff of dedicated professionals like the Washinton Post?
The problem with this is that it assumes most folks who surf the net aren't freeloaders. But, as the web shows, most folks who surf the net _are_ freeloadrs. The typical response of the typical websurfer is: gimme. Gimme free mp3s. Gimme free pics. Gimme free porn. Gimme free journalism.
When you study the 50% of the population of America that surfs the web, you realize it's an endless parade of hundreds of millions of panhandlers, all with their hands out, staring into your eyes with a hard impudent glare, yelling: "Gimme!"
Unfortunately, that's not a population likely to support any substantive poublic institution, be it the ny times or the Washington Post. You can poll all the panhandlers in America, and without exception you'll find that not one of 'em donates to the Chicago Symphony or the National Institute of Health or the Sierra Club.
So most likely, reputable news organizations are going away, and they'll be replaced by Drudge and Faux Noose. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth. Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia...
Posted by laertes | Link to this comment | 11-25-05 5:28 AM
Cool site
Posted by laski erotyka | Link to this comment | 12-17-05 6:59 PM