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How is The New York Times Really Doing? (om.co)
Wired magazine did a profile on The New York Times in its this month's issue. Talking about the paper's transition from print to more digital-focus than ever, author Gabriel Snyder wrote, "It's to transform the Times' digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever." Veteran journalist Om Malik analyzes the numbers: -> The company reported revenue of nearly $1.6 billion in 2016 -- remarkably consistent with prior years.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
-> Print advertising revenue dipped by $70 million year-over-year to $327 million in 2016.
-> Digital advertising revenue, while a meaningful portion of the Times' revenue, did not grow enough to offset vanishing print ad dollars.
-> Total digital ad revenue in 2016 was $206 million, up only 6% from the prior year.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business, which added more than half a million paid subscribers in 2016. Thanks in part to interest around the presidential election, the newspaper added 276,000 new digital subscribers in Q4, the single largest quarterly increase since 2011 (the year the pay model was launched).
The Times' digital success is hinged upon two major drivers: affiliate revenues from services like the Wirecutter and digital subscriptions. Advertising might be a good short term bandaid, but the company needs to focus on how to evolve away from it even more aggressively. The Times needs to simplify their sign-up experience and make it easier for people to pay for the subscriptions. As of now, it is like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
Isn't this sort of thing just kowtowing to Trumps use of "failing" every time he mentions the New York Times in tweets or press conferences? We all know why he does that - spread enough misinformation about a companies situation and eventually enough people get spooked to make it true. The numbers don't show a failing company, they merely show a transitional one.
They've got to get over their hatred of Trump before they can succeed. Even anti-Trump people want to hear about something else once in a while.
NYT does not strike me to be a failing business. At least NYT does not have to resort to stiffing contractors like Trump to turn a profit.
Really, the simple fact is that we don't need as many outlets as we used to. One outlet can serve people around the world.
Naturally, there's going to be some consolidation - particularly if you can't convince enough people that your product is worth paying for above all the others.
Slashdot posts a couple of articles a week that invite Trump bashing. This one is a perfect example, you see "New York Times" in the headline and you know there will be a couple of hundred posts, most of which will mention Trump.
The problem is that the NYT no longer meets their motto of "all the news that fits, we print" (apparently it's not "fit to print", but that's a quibble).
Rightly or wrongly (and I'd argue wrongly), they've embraced "advocacy journalism". Having a monoculture is never a good thing, because it renders the entire organization vulnerable to a common flaw. The NYT embraces diversity in every way, except in the most important one: thought. Politically, they are a monoculture, and that hurts them.
The problem isn't that lockstep ideology renders their editorial positions predictable; that's fine. It's the fact that it affects their news coverage, and it affects it negatively. When I'm reading a news story, I shouldn't be able to tell what the writer's opinions on the matter are, and yet in far too many cases, it's obvious. Worse, it's not only affected how stories are covered, but whether they get covered at all.
The most damning criticism of the NYT I've heard was a friend of mine who cancelled her subscription a few years ago. Her reason was that she was "tired of hearing people discussing controversies I'd never heard of". When newspapers decide not to report on a story because they feel it might empower their ideological opponents, they're not being reporters, they're being advocates. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, but you should at least be honest about it.
And, as the saying goes, "that's how you get Trump". How could an organization the size of NYT get the election so wrong? Because they were looking at it with blinders on. They may have put on the blinders intentionally, but their readers didn't. And yet their readers still suffered the effects of the blinders, too.
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Kinda hard to judge the figures where there are no references as to where they came from in the links, but there are over 1.2 billion people in China. Anything you say about the "average Chinese" is bound to be wrong for many tens or hundreds of millions of them. There are only about 65 million people in the whole UK, so mild interest from China would likely constitute a massive boost in readership for a UK newspaper.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And this will be a fair comparison the moment when:
a) Trump prints retractions of his errors when they're pointed out to him
b) The signal-to-noise ratio of the Times approaches anything near Trump's utterances
Last post!
Does trump a) apologize for his mistakes or b) blame someone else & double down?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Which is why Donald Trump is more believable than the NY Times
Only if you are a self-insulated, ignorant non-reader who only wants to hear your point of view from anyone willing to tell it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Slashdot recently had an article regarding a law suit against Apple. The summary went something like this:
Google's lawyers said blah blah blah on Friday in the appeal they filed ABC's to law suit. Google says they blah blah blah. According to Google's lawyers, they are right because blah blah blah.
Not a single word about what the other company's position is. Does that sound like a fair and objective story?
Does such reporting *work*, does it strongly influence opinion? ALL of the comments posted on Slashdot were based purely on the claims in the summary (Google's claims) and therefore supportive of Google. I'm the only one who pointed out that Google made these in an APPEAL - the jury, after listening to evidence from both sides, had already decided that the other company was right. Therefore the other company most likely has a fair point or two - no mention in the Slashdot summary of what the other company said (and the court ruled was correct).
In almost all disagreements, both sides have a point, or a legitimate concern. One side may have a *stronger* point, but there *are* two sides - otherwise there wouldn't be a dispute. If a source fails to present both sides of an issue they are reporting on, it's probably a source of opinion, not news.
The human brain is wired for pessimism. It's a survival reflex. We want to read about bad news so as to be better prepared in case something like that comes our way.
Perhaps the original "fake news", in fact, came from our religious leaders. They tell us that sacrificing a hecatomb to Zeus or chanting a magic spell such as "There is no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet" or "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour" will ward off evil. Bad news reminds us that reality is different. That prayer and a positive attitude stop short of being able to halt the anvil falling from above, that mountains have more faith that they won't cast themselves into the sea than we do otherwise (and that TNT has more faith than either us or mountains). That it truly does rain upon both the Just and the un-Just, although the un-Just can generally afford umbrellas.
A steady diet of bad news isn't healthy either, though. Which is why we like our news sources salted with tales of baby ducks being rescued from storm drains.
Thank you for providing an example of how Trump's supporters happily reinterpret his statements so as to at least try to make them jive with reality.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05...
This one was on Page 11 and drafted 2 years earlier. Make you feel any better, you shill?
Go jack off to Alex Jones and enjoy your bubble of ignorance.
I'm a Trump supporter, and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I know Trump is a narcissistic asshole who doesn't give a shit about the truth. He's playing the game your ilk invented, and doing it better than you ever imagined possible. You're just angry that your side lost, but you know they're all playing the same game.
You're either a moron or intellectually dishonest if you actually believe that Hillary or the Democrats have some kind of moral superiority. They lie, cheat, and steal just as much, if not more.
The government finds the government not guilty, hardly surprising.
This is just like Hillary and her emails. She broke the law and everyone knows it but the FBI wouldn't act "because Hillary".
Or like the AHA with Obama warning the Supreme Court that overturning his precious law would be "unprecedented".
Or like Benghazi where we still don't know what the hell happened or who ordered our assets in the area to stand down.
Or like the BP spill where the Mines and Minerals Service wasn't held to account for not enforcing existing regulations.
Etc..
Plenty of rage we're coming off of that is valid rage.
Not to mention.. if you like your plan you can keep it and the average working family will save $2000 on their premiums.
Gotta agree with sibling, and can drill down even further...
There's a reason I still support and read our local paper, printed in the town nearest my house; this is a town that has barely 2,000 souls in it, mind. Oh, and the "local" TV news around here covers and centers on Portland, OR - which is 50 miles away.
The NYT isn't going to tell me the school board minutes, the city council minutes, or the local budget/tax/bond stuff. I don't expect the NYT to print a picture of my kid making the winning score at the last high school basketball game, or remind me when stuff like the Friendship Jamboree is coming up. No coupons for the local grocery store are going to be found in the NYT, either.
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Also, there is a hazard in consolidation, one we can already see. The US (and UK, and etc) have a grand tradition of slanted/yellow journalism that is present even today, denials be damned. Only difference is back then, the papers proudly proclaimed their slants up-front (today? Not so much - you usually get denials from 'em). The best way to counterbalance that bias was to have competing outlets with different slants, then you could compare/contrast to get the actual truth of a given matter if you wanted it.
Besides, do you really want to go back to the days (1970's-1990s or so) where a select few outlets were the literal 'gatekeepers of truth'? Personally, well, fuck that. Let the marketplace win out - webhosting is cheap, the code for it is free of cost, and it doesn't take much more than a 10th grade education these days to set up a working bit of homegrown journalism. The market can (and in my opinion will) choose the winners and losers from the lot (see also The Drudge Report --love it or hate it-- as an example of a local gossip rag/site that exploded and went international.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?