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NYT Publisher Says Not Focusing on Engineering Was A Serious Mistake
curtwoodward writes "You'd have a hard time picking just one way the traditional news business stumbled into the Internet era. But America's most important newspaper publisher says one mistake sticks out. In a recent discussion at Harvard, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. of the New York Times said newspapers really messed up by not having enough engineers on hand 'building the tools that we're now using.' Instead, the the news business faces a world where outsiders like Facebook and Twitter control the technology that is distributing their work."
Or maybe those outsiders are just better.
All of this is very dangerous trend, where public and private entities (corporations) control majority of our speech. How can one exercise freedom of speech when in 21st century nearly all speech is digital, over this or that walled garden?
We have Net Neutrality protecting data transmission, where is our Digital Speech Neutrality?
And they still haven't figured it out, which is why many of them are sticking their content behind ineffective paywalls instead of building robust discussion communities.
These days, I surf to Google News and generally click on the first link that doesn't seem to have a video on it. I read so much faster than I could watch a video that as soon as I see one, I hit backspace instantly. (Also since I'm usually at work with mute on and very few of them have proper closed captioning on their videos!)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
used to be if you wanted to advertise in NYC, you did it in the NY Times. everything from a home to a car to a job. now someone else owns the platforms for advertising
but then again, the NY Times was always a snobby paper that turned its nose on anything the staff believed was below them.
A top newspaper like the NYT is all about the newsroom culture where the reporters are the heroes. IT is backroom in that environment. A big investment in IT would've been wasted because it would've been almost impossible to manage an innovation culture almost completely separate from the main mission of the company.
What they need to do is partner with IT companies in that space. Choose a small cap partner that will give them a stake, don't just rely on FB or Amazon or whatever.
"We didn't want to hire any of those 'computer geeks' to do our jobs. We know news because we make it!"
Just yet another old business who forgot that things change. And now they are largely irrevelant. And don't like it much.
They wouldn't fit in the culture of insular, ultra-liberal, upper class Manhattanites that define The New York Times.
Indeed, the only attribute that engineers as a group share with NYT staffers is that they're both extremely white.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
for a whoring profession... i get a laugh out of journalism 'ethics' being taught in schools...
In elementary school, the smart kids get made fun of simply because they are smart. Then it continued into middle school. It wasn't until High School that they started to realize "Hey, the smart kids actually know the answers!".
You'd think by adulthood they'd have learned their lesson... Then again we are talking about an industry that, 20 years after the public was able to get news via computer and ~10 years after they were able to get news on their phone, only recently decided to ditch the paper.
No.
They could have had every engineer who wound up working for FaceTubeTwitSpace on the NYT staff in 1999 (assuming timewarp so they're not 12 at the time) and they would still have failed, because the management would never have listened to the engineers. Because the engineers would have said, "Hmmm, this business model is going to fail because of distributed peer-to-peer information and content delivery. We should build a peer-to-peer information and content delivery instead, cannibalize and eventually abandon print advertising."
Would. Not. Happen.
To complete the /. analogy, this would be like in 1890, an engineer at a buggy whip manufacturer saying "Yeah, we're making tons of money off buggy whips, but this won't last. We need to retool our leather workers to make steering wheel covers for these new automojiggers instead, or I guarantee, in a little over a hundred years, people on futuristic electrically connected typewriters will write each other personal letters in which they use our industry as an example of failed business processes!"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No, that's not true
But more recent upstarts like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and many more have created Web and mobile platforms that offer useful, personalized ways of processing and delivering information.
That leaves the news establishment playing catch-up.
Twiiter, Facebook, Reddit, etc ... is for delivering individual's shit. The NYT is in a different league.
Instead of looking at how shit is delivered, why isn't he looking at (as far as I know) the Economist or the Wall Street Journal? Those guys have learned how to use the web with their traditional business and thrived. Or better yet, try something that no one else has done.
Hiring more engineers doesn't help when your fundamental business model is flawed. Generations in the past, newspapers used to be about freedom. Now, newspapers are about control. The Internet is about freedom. Adapt or perish.
The interesting question is whether you can have serious, in-depth, journalism without print - there's a reason Snowden went to the papers and not to a TV station - but you're not going to answer it with engineers.
Now here was a paper who was forward thinking. Just like Japanese car makers never make excuses they just execute.
Japan knew the Internet was going to make a lot of content obsolete and so they started to release CD's of their news archives.
Shortly after that they started to produce an online version of their newspaper. WOW how novel!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun
The NewYork Times failed to Execute now they will be Executed.
The soft practitioners of social sciences frequently look down on the hard sciences. Why would an elite organization like the NYT hire engineers? Artists, designers, writers - yes, of course. An engineer? It would be like hiring a soldier or a rancher, a total non sequitur for the Times.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
.. it's how you die..
Before, it was really hard to run a newspaper, and done mostly so that the printing infrastructure had something to do while not printing books.
Today you don't need the infrastructure. communication is both more local and more global, and newspapers are so big, that they desperately need to be i) popular and ii) alot-of-money making.
These ideals go against real journalism, and as now anyone with facebook can research and post; everything from commentaries, critiques or even news, we're getting real newsworthy content from such sources and not the old infrastructures who regurgitate popularist hype and adverts.
They are obsolete in their current form, may their demise not harm any new ventures that will develop in their stead.
The skills nevermind conception of social media would have been as it is, to undo the newspapers and replace it... no functioning business model. The publisher is looking at the technology and saying 'We should have done that' and is looking at the impact but forgetting that the world view to create those social media technologies is a different skill set.
He should go have a long lunch with someone from the record industry.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Back in the late 90's up to about 2001, I worked as a web author/web developer at a not so huge newspaper... we in the web department (Known as Electronic Publishing internally) had a pretty free hand to try and figure out how to keep the paper on top of technology.
We were pretty innovative for the time - we got our classifieds and real estate and obits online and we were able to publish breaking stories immediately and get our content online before it was in the physical paper ... a bunch of neat stuff.
Then, sometime in mid 2000, our paper got bought by a big conglomerate.... they had their own very cookie cutter online approach and gutted the soul of our department - there was no innovation - hell, we lost a huge number of features that we had been doing for a couple years, but they didn't have equivalents for in their system.
They homogenized their "online strategy" and threw out the baby with the bathwater... Now, I think they're still struggling with trying to stay relevant as the world moves farther and farther away from paper - they are too big and too stuck in their ways to have the kind of entrepreneurial innovation that our smaller paper had...
Ok, sorry for rambling on - the point is that some papers - the ones who "got" the web may have been able to innovate and stay relevant ... but the big media behemoths have had a much harder time adjusting... they're simply not agile enough and not willing to embrace "disruptive technologies" (tech that threatens their current business model)
The bigger they are, the more slowly they turn.
The Digital Sorceress
There are another couple of factors at work. First, journalists tend to be English majors who say things like, "math is hard," or "computers hate me." Second, once they come to work for a place like the New York Times their fragile egos swell to gargantuan proportions to insulate them from the reality that they really don't know how to do anything, and nobody really cares what they have to say. Next to those two factors, the presence or absence of engineers in their walls is irrelevant.
Even as recently as two years ago their entrenched attitudes had not altered one bit, though the increasingly frequent waves of layoffs had sent hot jets of fear up their spines. They started to wake up to the fact that their way of life was slipping away. But instead of taking concrete action to do something about it, they clung to fantasies like ebooks and tablets being the white knight that would save all of publishing and allow them to continue to be elitist snobs.
Now that that promise has evaporated, they are reduced to sniping at the "pfah! mere bloggers" who have been scooping them on story after story lately. They thumb their noses at crowd-sourced reporting platforms like Ushahidi. They get their panties in a bunch when the Whitehouse invited the first blogger to participate in the press briefings. They worry that they are incapable of doing that kind of reporting any more because the corporate overlords who they've gotten so deeply into bed with will not allow the truth to come to light lest they should not invite them to their fabulous parties anymore.
But most of all, they won't deal with reality because they just cannot tolerate the idea that the control of the public discourse is slipping out of their fingers for good, and that they will be undeniably as irrelevant as they, deep down in their hearts, have always known they are.
And that, my friends, is something that no amount of engineers or platforms or technology in the world can save them from. So, dear old New York Times, because you refuse to adapt to the times, I am afraid your times are about up. Pack up and go commiserate with your former star reporters, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The NYT is a hidebound unionista redoubt, resistant to new ideas from within or without. They think like employees, not entrepreneurs. And that, ultimately, is why they will fail.
Dog is my co-pilot.
There will still be reporters and the news sites that managed to adapt enough to survive in the Internet era, but I don't think there will be print papers for that much longer. I suspect Google will be the largest employer of reporters in the future, and that they'll somehow figure out how to outsource local news reporting. Google had the kind of vision to build the media platform of the future. Newspapers didn't.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Software developed by non-software companies tends (in my experience) to disappoint on all three counts: quality, price, and speed of delivery.
For starters, non-software companies typically suffer from the All Three fallacy: they want it good, cheap, and fast. No "pick one" principle here: they want it all. Over-optimistic projections then give way to crappy software and extended disappointment.
The core problem, however, is that software companies are better at creating software (forgive me for stating the obvious) because they specialize in creating software, which puts non-software companies (newspapers, banks, whatever) in the second ranks at best.
Related observation: non-software companies have been hot for "Agile" over the past several years; in my experience, every last one of them is not taken seriously, or indeed is treated with rich and deeply-felt contempt, by every last developer at that company. (Personally, I try to let it go, write it off as inevitable industry marketing jargon.)
-kgj
He's looking at two successes ( twitter, facebook), ignoring all of the failures in the same vein ( myspace, friendster, plurk, etc) and assuming that if they had just hired enough engineers they would have had the the successful companies and not failed like the other companies trying to do the same thing.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
From the second fine article: "It's the nature of employees to want to do the things outsiders might do for you. And it's not just money it's costing you. People coming from outside your organization are free to think without the encumbrances of insiders."
No, it's not. It's the nature of consultants to want to separate you as a company from your money. It is the nature of consultants to attempt to sell their services by any means possible, including questioning the work ethic and intelligence of employees.
"People coming from outside your organization are free to think without the encumbrances of insiders."
Yup. Instead, they are completely shackled by the encumbrances of outsiders: Not being truly invested in a company's well-being at the top.
I've been at this awhile now. I've been a consultant (and liked it) and an employee (and liked that, too). I've seen organizations go through the outsource-insource-outsource cycle enough to know it makes little difference.
BREAKING NEWS: Consultant Thinks You Should Hire Consultants.
I liked that band...
"Instead, the the news business"
The irony in this is that it was technology that made the newspapers possible. Without the technology of the printing press there would never have been newspapers in the first place.
Proverbs 21:19
New York Times is Government biach. Lets not forget how NYT asks every agency it can find before publishing a story. They sat on warrantless wiretapping story not to upset Washington.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It is a business school fundamental teaching nowadays that a company better cannibalize its own product before someone else does. In the real world, that almost never happens. It is just too hard for the financial minds in a company to approve any act which jeopardizes current profits.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That pretty much sums up at least the last two generations of the entire nation.
I remember many years ago the Dallas Morning News threatening to sue anyone who made a hyperlink directly to a story, instead of linking to the front page and telling people to go find the story (obviously so DMN could get more ad impressions). They should have hired more programmers and engineers so that they would eventually find one that would make outside links (referrer not from their own domain) redirect to their front page.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
PAGES Inc., software developer, initially built templates for TIME magazine to shorten time to market. The pulp version was 3 days stale before presses printed the news. TIME's goal was to get it down to 3 hours. TIME chose to forgo software and the rest is history. Apple copied the concept of the defunct corporate project naming the application after its namesake inspiration, Pages.
Or maybe those outsiders are just better.
We know that in general, content publishers are severely incompetent in applying technology to business.
We got an early example of that when the MPAA tried to get the VCR banned, which actually turned out to be one of their most lucrative sales channels.
And it's not just incompetence with the technology itself. It's incompetence in advancing the business to work with the the available technology -- exactly the kind of skill you'd expect those MBAs to have.
So it comes as no surprise when another arm of the publishing industry (the newspaper arm, in this case) ends up being incompetent with technology.
I gave up on Google News years ago when it became obvious it was being gamed by propagandistic 'news' outlets like Fox News and Newsmax to get their biased (or outright lying) headline as the large leading one on top of any story even remotely connected to politics, economics, military action, or women's rights. Google never bothered to address the gaming, so it's not even worth pulling up anymore.
It's not that the NYT needs software engineers. It's that they need ad engineers. You know, the slimeballs who figure out how to hang relevant ads on everything. (Including personal email - that was really slimy.) The slimeballs who figure out how to reformat crap to maximize the number of ad impressions. (See any online "Top 10" list.)
Distributing news is straightforward. It's monetizing the process that's hard.
We all know that Newspapers and even to some degree, TV and Radio are "Old School" news reporting. It is filtered and biased news sources now. People make fun of Fox News and MSNBC, and places like CNN, NYT and Washington Post for their bias, but that has always been the case, they are just getting caught more, in their lies and lies of omission. It is treating the public as infantile ignorant boobs, because that is how they view the public. Granted, a large portion of the populace is more interested in the latest misdeeds of Ms Cyrus than who is killing who in Syria.
Here is a great example of the bias in "traditional news media" http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/16/time-mag-hides-putins-success-from-u-s-voters/
While I'm aware that Time magazine often has different covers for different regions, this one is one that exposes the bias and the assumption that Americans care less about Putin (and Syria) than a sports story.
The problem is, many Americans, and people around the world, are bypassing the old guard simply because they aren't getting the "real" story, but rather one that has been massaged and twisted for easy consumption by the masses. These news organizations put forth "AR-15" during the recent shooting at the Naval Shipyard in DC, along with descriptions that were simply no accurate to who the shooter was, and are now ignoring the mental illness aspect of the story because none of that fits the narrative (bias) they want to portray.
It would be comical if it weren't so blatant. I do not trust anything that has been filtered, or run through the media machine. Things like Twitter and Blogs provide a mess of opinion and facts, but are pure and raw in a way that provides a better and more balanced view of the events as they unfold. The old guard media is still concerned with controlling the flow of information, in a world without any controls on that flow. They are going to lose.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
...if you live in New York.
What the newspapers needed are analysts, not engineers.
Analysts start with facts, not bullshit standard 'industry wisdom.'
to wit, first demolish 2 silly assumptions:
The New York Times has never been as popular as the Natl Enquirer and News of the World. That's a fact, So don't equate the NYT with the newspaper biz.
Second, most newspapers made money on their classified and display ads. Subscriptions are not for profit; they are only to show to advertisers to justify the cost. In other words, subscription numbers are just the number of eyeballs for sale.
Start from the real starting place and you might find a way out. Hiring engineers to put molded brushed aluminum rails around your product is about as useful as putting lipstick on a pig.
Engineering is Outsourced to CHNINDIA.
Casteism
A BA in Journalism, Political Studies, Women's Studies, Equity Studies, Gender Studies or Human Rights studies and all the political crap that it entails does not prepare you for actually any heavy intellectual effort (unless you want to work at Starbucks). NY Times, Wash Po and other are now reaping the the problems of their employment decisions way back.