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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.
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.
Really, I have to give them credit where credit is due: by repeatedly pointing out errors (however trivial) out of the tens of thousands of news stories that are published every day, they've managed to get their supporters to the point where they'll trust a new story on www.siteiveneverheardofbefore.com/newishstuff/hillaryclintonpedophilering.html more than they will an actual newspaper. It's a real masterstroke in terms of controlling the narrative. "Anything negative you hear about me, it's fake, because there exist cases where newspapers have made errors, and we've selectively presented you only with those cases to create a narrative for you that newspapers are packed full of fakery." Not just newspapers - fact checkers, peer-reviewed articles, even official government statistics - all fake, because they've been presented with every case people can get their hands of of error, without the balancing context of the 10000x more that wasn't in error.
In the words of XKCD: "Dear God, I would like to file a bug report". ;)
It's the same thing that contributed to the Challenger explosion. They had a nice clean graph in front of them that plotted O-ring failures vs. temperature. There was no clear trend visible on the graph. The problem was that they omitted the successes, the cases where there were no O-ring failures. Here's what it looked like with that added in. All of the sudden there's a very clear trend of failure increasing at low temperatures - in fact, every low temperature launch had had O-ring failures, while very few high-temperature launches had. By being selective in what data you present (accidentally in that case, on purpose in the present case), you can get people to believe precisely the opposite of what is true.
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
The GOD EMPEROR spoke. HIS word is law. All praise Trump!
Trumpmen!
Trump is definitely helping the NYT to succeed, even if that's not his intention. By singling out the NYT he's giving them a legitimacy as a voice for those that dislike Trump (which according to polls is well over half the nation). If he really wanted to hurt the NYT, which his words imply, he should stop talking to them and stop talking about them.
Everytime he bashes the NYT 100,000 people wonder what it is they said to upset him and go read the paper. Same with Saturday Night Live, the only reason I've watched it a few times is to go see what Trump was complaining about (and if he had a legitimate beef), I know I'm not the only one doing this.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
... When you can get news that you like from nearly anywhere and for free, why pay for it and why subject yourself to a New York City viewpoint from barely educated and mind warped fanatics?
"News that you like" is the operative phrase there. I'd like to think that it used to be different, bit I'm not sure it ever was. Maybe the majority always gravitated to the news they 'liked' in favour of the news that did its best to be accurate and unbiased, and maybe the generally more accurate and unbiased news of 40 years ago obscured the fact.
There's so much at stake now for governments and corporations wanting to control the narrative. 'News', (and I use the term very loosely), is often a make-or-break thing when it comes to elections, IPO's, product launches, sales numbers, law suits, new legislation, and even criminal cases, (to name a few); so simply reporting the facts and adding a bit of insightful analysis is kind of obsolete. The distinctions among news, editorials, and advertising have all but disappeared. If people already have a tendency to choose the (um...let's call it 'reportage') that they like, regardless of its accuracy or relevance, then the market is ripe for hucksters and con men of every stripe looking to sway the opinions of a constituency or a nation. It's no accident that Kellyanne Conjob coined the phrase 'alternative facts'. She was pilloried for it, and rightly so, but in one sense she was just pointing out the nature of today's reality, which is that, for a distressingly large number of people, fact is no different from opinion, and is simply a matter of preference. Our culture seems to have made 'critical faculty' a pejorative term; for the history of why that's so, read John Taylor Gatto, among others.
In an era when people can hear the 'news' that they prefer, for little or no money, does the NYT have any chance of long-term survival?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
People have been claiming newspapers are obsolete in some shape or form for 50 years, ever since television became everyone's primary method for keeping up with the news. In practice, newspapers, while hit, never went away, while TV news has become supplanted by the Internet.
And who is dominating news on the Internet? Oh, yeah, the newspapers. Most of us have at least one newspaper's website that's on our rotation of sites to check every day, despite the attempts to get us to use news apps or search engine news aggregators - both of which suffer in that they mix the latest from, say, the Daily Mail, with that of The Guardian or Washington Post.
As for this:
Few do, But few have ever done. You think, if you teleported back to a New York Subway car in the 1940s, every strap hanger was reading the New York Times on the way to work? Go to a London Underground Tube Train in the 1950s, and every passenger was reading The Times, Guardian, or Telegraph?
There's always been a range of newspapers providing news in different formats for different readers, and the most popular have always been the ones screaming headlines that today we'd call "clickbait", and whose articles are scarcely a few sentences long.
The New York Times is an exception, because it caters for the market of people who want more. It's always been a small minority that reads it. The difference between the days of paper and today are that all of a sudden the NYT can have an engaged audience that spreads far beyond the range a printed, time critical, newspaper can be delivered within, and that without page limits, its no longer limited to coverage of the region it serves.
Which is why the New York Times is doing very well right now, when 20 years ago it wasn't.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
They didn't need that graph. Glass transition temperature in polymers is taught to just about every engineering student on the planet in first year materials science subjects.
As Feynman showed it was a management fuckup of ignoring experts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They keep reporting what he actually says, as opposed to what he apparently meant to say... or something. The whole "what happened in Sweden" thing is a perfect example of how Trump makes unhinged and false statements, and then his press team and the legions of true believers will reinterpret those statements so, at least in their minds, he doesn't look, well, unhinged and dishonest. "Ah well, he wasn't talking about a specific event, but you know, general problems in Sweden." How is it that a grown man who is such a tremendous dealmaker needs a full-time public relations team to translate his utterances into something vaguely like the truth? And how is that you can condemn the press for reporting those utterances? Isn't that the press's job? But oh no, because the press doesn't do Conway's job for her, they're "pushing a narrative".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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!
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.
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
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.
No it can't. There's value in local news teams that you don't get with national or international outfits. That's why the televised networks usually have local news followed by national and world news. Most people are primarily interested in their area, and only the top stories beyond.
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.
--
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?