New York Times CEO: Print Journalism Has Maybe Another 10 Years (cnbc.com)

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson believes that the newspaper printing presses may have another decade of life in them, but not much more. "I believe at least 10 years is what we can see in the U.S. for our print products," Thompson said on "Power Lunch." He said he'd like to have the print edition "survive and thrive as long as it can," but admitted it might face an expiration date. "We'll decide that simply on economics," he said. "There may come a point when the economics of [the print paper] no longer make sense for us. The key thing for us is that we're pivoting. Our plan is to go on serving our loyal print subscribers as long as we can. But meanwhile to build up the digital business, so that we have a successful growing company and a successful news operation long after print is gone." CNBC reports: Digital subscriptions, in fact, may be what's keeping the New York Times afloat for a new generation of readers. While Thompson said the number of print subscribers is relatively constant, "with a little bit of a decline every time," the company said last week that it added 157,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2017. The majority were new subscribers, but that number also included cooking and crossword subscriptions. Revenue from digital subscriptions increased more than 51 percent in the quarter compared with a year earlier. Overall subscription revenue increased 19.2 percent. Meanwhile, the company's fourth-quarter earnings and revenue beat analysts expectations, "even though the print side of the business is still somewhat challenged," Thompson said. Total revenue rose 10 percent from a year earlier to $484.1 million. New York Times' shares have risen more than 20 percent this year. "Without question we make more money on a print subscriber," Thompson added. "But the point about digital is that we believe we can grow many, many more of them. We've already got more digital than print subscribers. Digital is growing very rapidly. Ultimately, there will be many times the number of digital subscribers compared to print."

Comments

They thought vinyl was dead, too...

[olsmeister]

and here we are.

Sadly true

[jwest]

I commute into a major US city every day and just today noticed someone reading an actual newspaper on the train. I can't even remember when the last time I saw that. Between me with my book and him with his newspaper, we really stood out among the rest of the passengers. If newspapers and books aren't for commuters, who are they for? And commuters have left them by. Sadly, I think this is an accurate assessment..

Subscription fatigue

[Miamicanes]

I wouldn't mind paying someone like Amazon or Google $10/month for access to every meaningful newspaper in America (with Google dividing it up among the papers I read that month), but I refuse to get sucked into a half-dozen monthly subscriptions... especially when seemingly all of them are "pay {some reasonable} rate for the first {n} weeks, then {get ass-raped} thereafter until you notice and cancel". I MIGHT do it if there were an option to automatically end the subscription once the promo rate expires, but over the past few years, I've gotten to the point where I automatically tell anyone trying to get me to sign up for teaser rates that silently go up to just go fuck themselves and die. I fell for subscription scams like that all the time when I was younger, but now it just seems like total bullshit and I refuse to put up with it anymore.

Deliberate misrepresentation by CNN

[thomst]

CNN's story (and the /. summary above) promulgate its own propaganda thusly:

newspaper printing presses may have another decade of life in them

The headline and CNN reporter Kellie Eli's quote above completely misstate NYT CEO Mark Thompson's actual point. What he said was "I believe at least 10 years is what we can see in the U.S. for our print products." (Emphasis added by me, for clarity's sake.)

Note the profound difference in meaning between Thompson 's statement "at least 10 years," and Eli's characterization of his meaning as, "another decade of life ... but not much more." (My elision here is, once more, strictly for the purpose of clarity.) Her story quotes him as saying, "an absolute minimum of 10 years" of existence for the NYT print edition, whereas the CNN headline (precisely echoed by /.'s own headline) twists that to, "Print journalism has maybe another 10 years," and that mischaracterization continues in Eli's purported paraphrase of his statement.

This would merely be another case of CNN clickbait, were it not for the fact that this time they're straight out lying to their audience about the content of the interview their story pretends to be about. And that point seems to have completely escaped /. editor BeauHD. The real story here is that a reporter for CNN - a non-print news organization - is deliberately misrepresenting what the CEO of one of best and most professional print journals still in existence has to say about the medium-term future of his own publication, one of CNN's major competitors.

In my universe, that's yellow journalism at its most despicable.

I think Donald Trump is a lying asswipe who wouldn't recognize an actual fact if it rose up and bit him on the bunghole - but, sadly, this story is patent, deliberate, no-shit, fake news.

CNN should be ashamed of itself - but it's been pellucidly clear for at least 3 decades now that it it has no sense of organizatonal shame, so I'm not holding my breath on that score. But it pisses me off mightily that it has so casually discarded what pitiful shreds of journalistic integrity it might once have had - and thereby placed me in the profoundly awkward and embarrassing position of being forced to publicly agree with the likes of Donald fucking Trump ...

Re:Deliberate misrepresentation by CNN

[danbert8]

And the media can't understand why Russian trolls are able to spread lies on social media. The Russians learned how to write headlines from 24 hour news networks. We wouldn't have a fake news epidemic if major news outlets (on all fronts) didn't sell out their objectivity for political gains.

It's a shame too

[Solandri]

One of the benefits of printed news is its permanence. You find a newspaper clipping from April 15, 1865 and you know that's what the people back then read.

The news I read on websites is often updated, edited, and re-edited to delete a controversial phrase, erase speculation which turned out to be mistaken, or add information which wasn't there in the original report (without updating the timestamp). You read a bunch of people complaining about the article, go read the source article for yourself, and because the statement was edited out you don't know what the fuss is all about and you think the people complaining are idiots. Likewise, whereas before if a newspaper published something which was later discredited, they'd print a retraction but the original evidence of their shoddy reporting was still out there. Nowadays they simply delete the discredited story, erasing their failure from history. Occasionally I link to newspaper articles from the 1990s, but I honestly have no idea if it's still true to the original or if it's been altered in the intervening quarter century. Archive.org used to help, but I'm increasingly finding more sites have set their robots.txt to not allow archiving. And perhaps more disturbingly, some sites have requested archive.org delete the entire archived history of their site.

Despite the explosion in the availability of information, historians of the future are going to have a bitch of a time figuring out what we were actually saying and thinking, because a lot of the evidence is being scrubbed, sanitized, or deleted. It's the digital equivalent of burning books, except it's all being done silently and out of sight. The only evidence being a broken link; or a "quote" in a forum posting which no longer matches the purported source, and you have no idea if the post is in error or if the source was edited.

Re:Been at least 25 years since

[No Longer an AC]

For me it's been about 20 years since I had a newspaper delivered to my doorstep.

I wasn't dissatisfied with the reporting or any bias in the paper, I had just moved on and got all the news I wanted from the internet (and admittedly TV). Newspapers were stacking up in my apartment waiting to be taken to the recycling center.

I used to spend Sunday afternoons flipping through every page of the newspaper while watching NFL games. Now I don't get a paper and I don't watch football. You might say I've changed as well.

When I stopped subscribing to the local paper I got so many calls from them trying to get me to resubscribe that I finally called up their
"newstips" number and told them about a newspaper who was violating the do-not-call registry. Then the calls stopped.

One interesting side effect of not getting the local paper is I'm probably more aware of what's happening in Syria than I am with what's happening locally. That doesn't mean I'm more knowledgeable about international affairs. Instead I'm probably just more ignorant of what's going on in the place where I live.

Re:Been at least 25 years since

[AmiMoJo]

I'd be more interested in local news if the local newspaper didn't just print fluff pieces and hyper-partisan bullshit. There is real corruption in my city, for example, but it's not investigated or reported.