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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.
>if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever
Yeah, and this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Report the NEWS instead of trying to concoct a "narrative" based on arrogantly believing you need to tell people how to think.
Or at least be like British newspapers and admit your fucking bias.
"->" in 2017, while we have these nice unicode arrows...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Who the fuck cares!
nobody likes bad news and thats what the papers have pushed hard for the last 20 odd years which coincidently marked a declining press, yes years before the internet even came about. If they were to go back to their roots and report the news in all its forms, stop only reporting politically correct items and focus on all the news like the stuff wikileaks has to leak because the press doenst do its job, then the people may return. They wont so news will die because the younger generation never got into new because its all false crap nothing true.
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.
The GOD EMPEROR spoke. HIS word is law. All praise Trump!
Trumpmen!
The NYT also has their award-winning liberal bias where everything Liberal Democrats do is awesome and anything Conservative Republicans is bad-bad-bad. They're no better than Gawker in many ways with their dead-tree version of click-bait and character smearing.
But yeah, lets throw some numbers around to make it look they might survive into the digital world.
Outdated legacy "news" outlet, now more correctly referred to as Carlos Slims Blog. And the new york times is to news as Cheez-Wiz is to cheese. It's not "news" it's processed news product with a side of establishment boot-licking.
if you like fake news with a liberal spin
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
NY Times, a bastion of truth.
Override the Slashdot CSS to use a font like FiraCode then.
When I saw the headline, my first thought was that slashdot had picked up the story about the major newspapers buying fake clicks from Chinese bots to increase their page rank and advertising revenue.
See here and here (or here).
See that "Preview" button?
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.
It shouldn't be "arrows" anyway, this is a list.
#DeleteFacebook
Or just wait for slashdot to use a modern encoding, like UTF-8, like everybody?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
My wife and I started subscribing to the (digital) NYT a couple years ago. (I don't want to contribute to the pro- vs anti-NYT aspect of the thread, so I'll just say we legit like reading the NYT and think it is worth the cash.) I don't remember sign up being that difficult; in fact I don't remember it at all. I am willing to believe it could be better (I read about how hard companies work for 'frictionless payments' all the time), I'd just be surprised 'sign up too hard' is a driver. Maybe it's good I don't work in that industry, then, because I apparently don't know anything.
They do have a neat joint spotify/NYT digital subscription promotion going on right now. It may be enough for me to cancel my subscriptions and restart them in my spouse's name.
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.
You don't want to be holding your breath on that one.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
that's fit to print.
Here, you can go right to the source: buggy.com
No need to thank me. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
are actually just spooks trying to sell their agenda. And how many different countries / agencies is a newspaper like this infiltrated by? And most importantly of all why no-one talks about this despite a huge number of testimonies, is it taboo?
Bankruptcy is merely a tool used in the business world. You stigmatize it because you think bad poor white people declare bankruptcy to get out of debt. However, it's one of he very few avenues for ending an S corporation, and the only one for ending a corporation when the shareholders don't have a majority agreement with the bond holders and debt holders on who should get what.
Worse, though, you're the sucker. You really believe that his business ventures have all failed because the news told you that he declared bankruptcy a few times.
I think, just like Vinyl experiencing a revival in music, there will always enthusiasts who will support an economy of printed newspapers.
For those complaining about Fake News in the United States, maybe it's time to consider reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, which clearly did an outstanding job of keeping things fair and balanced and worked to enhance the intelligence and civility of our society, not tear it down in the same of the selfie status quo we live under today.
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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Comment removed based on user account deletion
like the sound you hear when scratching your nails on a piece of glass.
Now we all know that Trump, Putin, Ali Khamenei, and Kim Jong-un are all going to put their ego trips away and play together nicely! What could possibly go wrong?
"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."
In general, it seems to me that the New York Times is poorly managed.
I don't think it was ever more objective, certainly not since William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s. Newspapers used to be more honest about their political leanings. For example, the Austin American Statesman used to be called the Austin American Democrat. Similar names can be found in smaller cities, the newspaper will be named Middletown Liberal Times or whatever.
The LA Times had a very clear policy of simply not reporting anything that didn't support their political leanings. In 1884 the ignored Grover Cleveland's election to president for several days, pretty much pretending it didn't happen.
I'm curious, how much are the Russians paying you to post pro-Trump bullshit all day? Can anyone get in on it? Are you paid per post or an hourly rate?
The user experience for NTT digital subscriptions is The Worst. I wonder why.
There are so many free sources of news, it may be impossible to sell it in the near future.
It may also be impossible for commercial news sources to compete with the millions of "news enthusiasts" that post and analyze news simply for the fun of it.
Events are posted in near real-time on youtube and thousands of people dissect and analyze Wikileaks releases the instant they hit the internet.
There is no commercial news room that can scale out to that size.
Yes, the availability of so much news does force the consumer to filter out bullshit for him/her self - but many times you are getting bullshit from paid mainstream media - so you have to do the due diligence anyway if you want to stay informed.
Good luck MSM - you are competing with the entire internet - and I don't think you will win.
fivethirtyeight's job (and statistical analysis in general) is to sort through the noise of "hundreds of millions" of voters.
They failed because they were wearing the same blinders NYT was (and still is) wearing.
Independent news is dead. It's up to you - the news consumer to get to the sources and sort through the BS. Unfortunately, there is no one left to do that for you.
And ye "thorn" character. Don't forget a venerable part of the English alphabet annihilated by ye importation of cheap thorn-less foreign German and Italian typefonts into England.
Bring back ye thorn! Make ye Empire Great Again!
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.
I correctly said "Google" five times in my comment, but I see I accidentally typed "Apple" in the first sentence.
It's because the NYT is more likely to lean on "trust us, we're the NYT" and list a bunch of anonymous sources who could tell anyone whatever story they want, whereas the other site in your example would have to link to actual, verifiable docs before anyone with any sense would believe it.
So quite how you equate "Won the electoral college" with "Trump must be popular" when the facts state otherwise can only be ascribed to insanity.
-> The key revenue driver for the New York Times has been its digital subscription business,
You forgot the ongoing program of the whole paper being a blatantly hardcore left wing proaganda rag. Thats gotta be worth quite a few undercover $$millions from the Democrat party, the Clinton Foundation and god knows which groups of billionaire social manipulators.
Report facts and give a list of verifiable sources. Don't expect people to believe that anonymous people told you what you wanted to hear.
It's terribly simple and they'd know it if they hadn't fallen down into the clickbait hellhole, but random internet comments often have better sourcing than stories from corporate media outlets.
quit trying to enforce your morality on me. not everyone uses it, or wants to. this is 'murika pal, back the fuck off.
The last time Slashdot tried anything Unicode-related, vandals used control characters in comment subjects to mess with the layout and spoof moderation scores. The administrators had to put in a strict code point whitelist to prevent these code points from appearing in comments posted thenceforth.
The Swedish thing was correct. Trump made no claims about any terror attacks: he just happened to watch a segment on FNC b/w Tucker Carlson and Ami Horowitz regarding the law & order situation in Sweden, particularly when it comes to immigrants and rape/murder. There has been a bit of discussion about that, and since in Sweden, and in much of Europe, it's considered hateful to even bring up issues like the impact immigrants have on crime, that stuff goes on unrepentant.
If the media or you wanna demonstrate that Trump's statements on this are false, pull out the statistics of rapes/murders in Sweden for any length of time backwards starting this year (or last), show how they co-relate to the number of immigrants who've come in (meaning Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, not native European people from Denmark or Holland or Switzerland), and demonstrate that when the number of immigrants went up, violent crime went down!!!
Uh, Fox News is a TV channel that one can also listen to on Sirius XM. Question of reading only comes in when one visits their website for the articles, which are typically word to word for what was narrated on the air. So where exactly does the question of readability arise?
Neither is the WaPo. The sooner they both fail, the better.
This is a race to the bottom the left cannot win. The right is used to and will tolerate an astonishing quantity of lies and bullshit. The left, as we've already seen, will become demoralized when faced with a candidate who is only a blandly, typically-horrible politician.
The Times has already reached "bad enough" in my estimation, along with every other news publication I've ever looked at in any detail. And unlike the millions of evangelicals who watch Fox News and reluctantly voted for Trump, I don't grade on a curve.
The mainstream media needs to aggressively, forcefully hold Trump to account. Given the amount of material they have to work with, this should be an easy task. Unfortunately, they have conclusively demonstrated that they cannot separate out lies from truth, much less the absurdly sensationalist and irrelevant from the reasonable and important. They've fallen prey to the greatest troll[1] the world has ever seen and it will destroy them in the end, once the lurid headlines lose their charm.
And history will record the moment of their downfall, of course, as the moment they tried kill two birds with one stone with their "fake news" non-story[2], too busy drinking their own kool-aid to realize that mainstream news has always been a pretty damn sketchy enterprise, even during its supposed golden eras.
1. Albeit probably one who is operating mostly on a subconscious level.
2. Fabricated news websites and chain emails and conspiracy theories obviously exist, but they've been around for a long time and are more of a symptom than a disease in their own right.
If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor
If you like your plan you can keep your plan.
All politicians lie, a lot. The fact that Obama was a smoother liar than Trump is not nearly as laudable as you think it is.
We're in this situation because millions of people lack basic skills in critical thinking. People who are unable to name a single logical fallacy are being encouraged to go out and vote.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
china = Chinese bots
But never mind the CEO is associated with known pedophiles and has previously defended pedophilia. Including an article in the NYT.
"They assigned a lower probability to Trump winning based on the polls"
You were so close to defining the problem with that statement.
fivethirtyeight doesn't simply perform statistical probability analysis. If that was the case, you could simply run the data through SPSS and be done with it.
Nate Silver and his group of hacks is supposed to look at the ENTIRE process. If you do your analysis on bad data - you will have a bad result. Nate Silver's blinders came from believing that the polls weren't biased - and they absolutely were.
NYT, Washington Post, fivethirtyeight and others simply did not question polls that jived with their pre-defined political beliefs....and as a result practically no one trusts their analysis.
many predictive failures - yes.
The last few years have shown the weakness in the predictive power of polls. (Brexit and the like: http://www.newsbusters.org/blo...)
Polling has turned in to a partisan activity in an apparent attempt to sway the outcome of the very thing being polled.
It is completely unlike predicting the weather.
1. Allow comments only from subscribers. People love to opine, and will pay for the privilege. 2. At the same time, allow comments on a larger range of articles. Particularly aggravating is that they don't normally allow comments to guest editorials. Why? If they can't take criticism, they shouldn't be writing editorials. 3. Allow subscribers only to turn off animated ads. NYT blocks at least some ad blockers, but without an ad blocker it is all but unreadable due to distraction from animated ads all over the page.
I want my comics with a digital subscription, otherwise I'll stick with the local rag in print, with syndicated comics, and get my digital news from the reposting sites, e.g. here.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Than to tweet and be proven a fool by anyone with a computer.
I don't want to read the NY Times online. I want a paper. I would pay for a timely, daily subscription, but I cannot have it delivered. I CAN, however, have the Wall Street Journal delivered. Sure, its in my mailbox, and the mail doesn't come until after 5 pm most days, but I have so much more time in the evening while cooking. How the NY Times managed to screw this up is beyond me. I can read the WSJ digital edition, but I don't. The WSJ can manage to have a paper in my mailbox in small town, middle of nowhere Texas everyday, and my kids don't see me staring at a tablet.
Fucking trolling nazi racist cunt International Libertarians now calling themselves Alt-Right led by Donald atrump and Steve Bannon have been trying to take down OUR EXCELLENT NEWS MEDIAso that these racist fucks can start up their own and have no challenge to their racist propaganda. Trump Network is coming! AWC is already here. RT is here too. Go buy a newspaper and see what Bannon and Trump don't want you to know!
If the Grand Old Girl wants to survive it has to become more moderate. They were cheerleaders for Hillary and made Drumph out to be the devil. Every. Chance. They. Got. Add in 'you are all *ists for daring to speak out against XYZ... and poeple move on. People are stupid.. but they dont want to be called stupid IF you expect them to buy your product.
IMHO You can be biased in your opinions but reporters are SUPPOSED to reign themselves in and not put their world view first. Report the facts as colored as little as possible and both sides will read it. Don't and you loose half the readers. With so many options the only LONG TERM solution is to be moderate. Report both sides and NYT could be the leaders again in 'print' news.
" thing is a perfect example of how Trump makes unhinged and false statements,"
No, it's actually true.
Sweden has had 3 major riots due to muslim immigrant violence.
Their serious crime rate, especially rape has jumped significantly.
As a result, Sweden has stopped actually stopped tracking whether the criminals are immigrants.
The darndest part is that if you report this in Sweden, this is considered hate speech, and you are liable for prosecution.
trump won. Get over it.
No fucker, CHEATING is how we got trump. Everyone knows it too but his supporters simply don't give a fuck. Party over people!