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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.
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.
The flaw in your reasoning here is that you are assuming two fallacies are true.
First, that people single-source their information. Even a given individual gets most of their news from the AP, for example, it doesn't mean they chose the AP. Perhaps they were linked most frequently to these articles. A method by which they probably are exposed to a great number of other information sources, but with the AP getting the most exposure for that individual.
Second, that the companies actually control the content that most people see. Facebook, for example, may be disturbingly Big Brotheresque in their policies, but their degree of censorship consists primarily of punishing breastfeeding mothers who post photos and deleting fan pages for Social Fixer, while allowing basically everything else but hardcore sex.
If you want more freedom of speech than the corporate providers are willing to provide, get your own server and promote it. Even in the days of Geocities, there were certain controls on your use of that space, and the alternative of running your own server has always been the primary way to ensure the freest of speech.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I've worked at a major newspaper. Reporters HATE technical people. That's one of the reasons tech reporting so bad... they won't even TALK to a tech person in most cases.
That culture hates (and can be very denigrating) to all people that are not reporters. Just getting an online presence itself very controversial at first.
The fact that most newspapers faltered is not a surprise and is based on their culture. They are going to have to actually embrace people of other skill sets if they can compete at all, and that's a cultural changing going right down to how journalism is taught at journalism schools.
People do not single source their information, which is absolutely true, but that misses the point. The point is that corporate information yells though a stack of a million amp PA speakers as compared to personal speech which is the equivalent of a whisper. If you say money is equal to speech you have to admit that some people get way more speech than others. Getting rid of net neutrality makes the problem 10 times worse because then you *can't* set up your own server and expect it to reach everyone. Setting up a linux server to serve yourself is not equal to a server room with 1000 servers... that's just a false equivalency.
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.
I think you are making a huge mistake here.
Yes they are results oriented, but sometimes the best results are not found in the free market. For example we pay more than other first world nations for healthcare and get less of it. Clearly not a good result. The same thing with cell phones, our lack of regulation is preventing a good result.
You are confusing fact based and result oriented with a fear of change or being able to adopt new ideas.
You realize you were paying this already right?
The moment we gave everyone care via the ER by law we decided this was the way to do healthcare in the USA. The hospital covers their losses on people who do not pay by charging higher prices for those who do.
People who cannot afford it would qualify for low income plans. I am not sure why you oppose personal responsibility. Just like car insurance, we all know the time will come you will need it and if you don't have it you will force everyone else to pay for you.
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
I've worked at a major newspaper. Reporters HATE technical people. That's one of the reasons tech reporting so bad... they won't even TALK to a tech person in most cases.
That culture hates (and can be very denigrating) to all people that are not reporters. Just getting an online presence itself very controversial at first.
The fact that most newspapers faltered is not a surprise and is based on their culture. They are going to have to actually embrace people of other skill sets if they can compete at all, and that's a cultural changing going right down to how journalism is taught at journalism schools.
I can vouch for this in the overall news world, and not just in newspapers. Long, long ago during the early days of the Web, before the dot-com boom, I worked at the Associated Press. The head of the entire AP had, as canon, a prohibition on embracing the Internet because he didn't want to do anything that supported it. He saw it not as an alternative source of distribution but as a competitor, and considered even looking into engaging on it as a way of fomenting competition against the AP's core business. His views were not exactly radical among the business of journalism at large, either; trade magazines either categorized it as a problem (if they were ironically visionary) or ignored it altogether.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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.
For the AP that was probably true (that the Internet was a deadly competitor). The AP represents one of the major things that is wrong with the newspaper business.
You look at a print version of some newspapers and it's filled with cusinarted AP articles. They've been butchered to fill empty column space. The newspaper that I actually read cover to cover has zero (0) AP articles in it.