End game for New York Times?
Everyone loves to speculate on the future of the New York Times. Henry Blodget said in December of 2010 that it “might even be bright” after the newspaper stopped “the train-wreck-in-progess.” Now comes Eric Jackson predicting that the Times “will be gone as a stand-alone newspaper by 2015″ and “the rest of the newspaper industry should face a similar crisis even sooner.”
* Why the New York Times will disappear as we know it by 2015
And now we all know that Eric Jackson is an idiot obsessed with Power Point which is exactly why he’s wrong about the NYT!
Those employed at the Times know how to write, Jackson only knows how to use Power Point.
I’m surprised he didn’t add animation, sound to his absurd presentation & use Comic Sans for the font!
Someone who makes his case against a paper should at least write it as an article, not with the single most maligned piece of software on Earth!
This man is a twaddling fool.
Hey Erik, lil buddy! I wanna tell you about something called the SEC. Hey pal, that’s where businesses give you their financial data. First off, do yourself a favor and read the latest segmental earning from the New York Times company. Now, little friend, go ahead and look what revenues are doing at the New York Times as a stand-alone paper.
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=105317&p=irol-SECText&TEXT=aHR0cDovL2lyLmludC53ZXN0bGF3YnVzaW5lc3MuY29tL2RvY3VtZW50L3YxLzAwMDExNTc1MjMtMTItMDAwNDUzL3htbC9zdWJkb2N1bWVudC8yL3BhZ2UvOQ%3d%3d
Oh my gooshy gosh! It looks like the New York Times is now making more money is this last quarter than it did in the same quarter last year. We call this “growing revenue”. Do you know what revenue means, lil buddy? It means they’re making more money and that all of that new money is coming from the paywall! Guess what will probably happen when the Boston Globe has its paywall up for a year too? Can you guess? Go for it, lil buddy!
Times is actually doing real well right now. This whole thing by Jackson smacks of someone trying to get cheap attention.
Romenesko lowered his usually lofty standards by posting this drivel.
Not sure about The New York Times. The paywall, however, is no answer. True, it’s doing a little better than they expected, but the revenue gained is minor and likely to remain so. Really, it’s more of a way to reduce the hemorrhaging on the print side, which is where the real revenue is.
The observations about Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, however, are spot on. These outfits don’t depend on advertising but on enormous revenues from the mostly unrelated business of financial industry “terminals”; the news business for them is a very low-profit sideline that they indulge in just for yuks. This, of course, means that if the news operations begin to lose money or otherwise become annoying, they can easily be chucked overboard.
The only other truly healthy media company in print (including digital) that I’m aware of is Britain’s Pearson PLC, which publishes the Financial Times and The Economist, both narrowly target an audience and, as with Reuters and Bloomberg, dependent on business news.
In general, though, U.S. newspapers at the moment, broadly speaking, aren’t doing all that badly when compared with other industries. Newspaper profit margins at a low point in their history are about 10 percent, which is actually quite good when most industries can reasonably expect only 8 to 10 percent margins when they’re at the top of their game.
Of course, the newspaper numbers are buoyed by results at smaller and medium-sized papers, which either never made the huge mistake of going digital or simply retain loyal readers and, more importantly, loyal local advertisers in ink on paper (again, the real revenue generator).
Hence, we’ve seen a lot of buying activity in the newspaper industry over the past year or so. Apparently, people who keep their eye on the real ball (not the high-profile Times and others) and know the industry because they have big money at stake see a bright future in print — just not at the Times and a few other big titles.
Who is Eric Jackson?