New York Times: Farewell sweet print?
Posted by Mediascaper on January 8, 2009
What would a post-print New York Times look like? In the current issue of The Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn asks that question and offers ways the Gray Lady could thrive in an online-only world.
Much of what Hirschorn proposes — a mix of original reporting with aggregation and outside news sources — is a model that should be increasingly familiar to news outlets forced to cut back their newsrooms as they contend with shrinking ad revenues and smaller circulation rates.
Had Hirschorn’s article been written about any number of Your Hometown local dailies, it’s unlikely it would have caused more than a single ripple across the vast oceans of the World Wide Web. (How’s that for an inappropriate metaphor?)
But our nation’s most storied newspaper? Its print demise is a scenario Hirschorn knows is loaded with drama and import:
Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon — sooner than most of us think — the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company.
Not surprisingly, the response to his provocative article has been quick from prominent media outlets.
Poynter Institute’s Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds takes Hirschorn to task for his eyebrow-raising prediction that the Times could cease print operations as early as May 2009:
The hypothesis of a May closing is pegged to the expiration then of a $400 million revolving line of credit. Hirschorn is aware that if the Times needs cash, it can borrow against the value of its new office building — as it has done now to the tune of up to $225 million. The company also announced on Christmas Eve that it has put its stake in the Boston Red Sox up for sale, which could fetch another $200 million.
Edmonds may be right on the money, so to speak, but I get the feeling he’s taking a bit too seriously what is essentially a narrative device intended to hook readers as a gateway to the issues of migrating to an online-only format. Hirschorn admits the Times likely isn’t going to disappear from newsstands this spring:
Granted, the odds that The Times will cease to exist entirely come May are relatively slim. Many steps could be taken to prolong its existence. The Times Company has already slashed its dividend. … The company could sell its share of the brilliant Renzo Piano–designed headquarters—which cost the company about $600 million to build.
Hirschorn also mentions About.com, the Red Sox and the The Boston Globe as other properties the Times Co. could unload to make up for falling revenues, a precursor to what he predicts would be “mass staffing cuts.”
His admittedly unlikely prophecy aside, the real purpose of Hirschorn’s article is to envision what the Times would look like as a Web-only publication, and how it could retain its prestige as a source of high-quality journalism in a medium that Hirschorn contends “has done much to encourage lazy news consumption.”
The more substantive sticking point between Hirschorn and Edmonds rests on the vision of an online-only Times. Edmonds writes:
I don’t begrudge Hirschorn his meditation on a future in which print’s role is minimal or disappears. I don’t happen to think, as he does, that Huffington Post, with its mix of unpaid opinion blogs, news lifted from elsewhere and hype, is the model.
Countering that view is one proposed by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, who is far more receptive to Hirschorn’s vision:
I also love that he presents the model for the new Times as Huffington Post. The Times would surely quibble with that. But they’re not as far apart as they might seem. Both respect good reporting. … The public, too, respects good reporting. So maybe the Times should buy the Huffington Post – or vice versa – and they can start to learn from each other now. Naw, that’s going too far.
Maybe not. Already, the Times has unveiled Times Extra, a version of its home page that features headlines and links from third-party sources.
To me, the success of the Times (and other news outlets) as a digital-only publication is predicated upon management’s ability to combine the immediacy and interactivity of the Web with a product (in this case, quality journalism) that makes it a daily must-read. Looking at Times Extra, it appears it may be well-positioned to do just that. It’s an issue I’ll be looking at more closely in a future post.
