New York Times: Honest work means honest pay
Some people hate The New York Times and some people love The New York Times — but everybody wants to read The New York Times for free. That will largely end in 2011. You probably read that today on the Internet, and you probably read it for free.
The Times said it will let you read some articles per month for free, then make you pay for more. It’s what the Financial Times does. Who said it had to be original? If you subscribe to the print edition, just keep reading it. This isn’t really about you. This is a decision that will, for better or for worse, inform the public that if you want journalists to tell you stuff or entertain you, you need to pay them to do journalism all day long.
Lots of people have opinions on this and lots of people have done the research. Even more people style themselves Internet experts. The one thing they can’t help is sharing opinions on whether news sites should charge or whether they’re not just misguided for doing it — but whether they’re stupid or criminally wrong.
Everybody knows the sins that newspapers committed online. People will tell you: “They should have done it in 1995. They should do this, they should do that. If they do this, they have to give up that. They’re old media, they deserve to die. They’re doomed. They should sell. Too little too late. It won’t move the needle. They’re doing the wrong thing. I have data, do the math.”
Many people make good points. Still, what does the Times have to lose? NYTimes.com visitors? Pageviews? Ad revenue that isn’t really doing them many favors anyway? Publishers get so much conflicting information, and, to be honest, are a bit doddering and confused — so they stand still. Things fall apart from there.
If newspapers keep giving away their news for free, the news will eventually stop coming. That’s not good. Look at it this way: you have to pay for news because you have to pay people to make it. When people say, “Screw newspapers. I get news on the Internet,” someone likely got paid to get that stuff written or photographed or shot.
Some people work for love and some for money, and most of us work for a combination of those things. I love journalism, but I need money to do it. If I can’t get money, I have to spend some or all of my day doing something different, and then I can definitely kiss my Pulitzer dreams and your enlightened mind goodbye. So it goes for the Times. They can’t staff the Times like volunteer firefighters. Nor can any paper. Beyond the calculations, consultants and chaos, that’s the story.
from Summit Notebook:
Daily Beast staff ‘happy as clams,’ says Barry Diller
The journalists and staff who work at The Daily Beast don't look at life like you other sad-sack scribes out there who are watching your job market wash out to sea with the ebb tide. In fact, they are happy in a particularly mollusk-like way.
"They're as happy as clams," said Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp, which is financing the online news outlet with its editor, Tina Brown. "They wake up every morning filled with possibility."
That's because they are not working at sinking-ship news outlets like most of the rest of their colleagues in mainstream U.S. journalism.
Hear Diller on this, speaking at the Reuters Global Media Summit:
"Look at what's going on in publishing. The talk about the destruction that's taking place there. It's the perfect time to start something that's an original product. The Daily Beast is a daily newspaper or magazine. It's primarily original and is there every day. It's got real staff, making real money, paying a lot of them -- journalists -- to make things for us, make stories... They're covering books, art, the daily features and national and international stories. And it's incredibly ambitious. It's gotten a real audience. It is absolutely an original product."
Who wouldn't like that? Even better, Diller seems OK with the whole "it doesn't make money" aspect of the Beast. He declined to say what the targets are, like, when he expects it to make a profit, when he expects it to make some revenue and how it will do those things. "We're going to know at a rational point," he said.
The best part is, I don't even end this blog with: "And then I woke up." Now the question is whether we can find some more sugar-moguls to sweeten our journalistic career paths.
Rupert Murdoch, the smartest man in newspapers?
I wrote an analysis on Monday about the possibility that News Corp might take its news search results away from Google and list them on Microsoft’s Bing search engine instead. My conclusion: This one isn’t such a hot idea. Then I read John Gapper’s Financial Times item about how it *could* be a hot idea.
To recap, here’s how it would work.
- Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
- Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
- News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
- Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.
I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don’t care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it’s unlikely. If they don’t find it, they won’t seek it.
Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:
In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. …
Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. … If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?
I hope News Ltd do this. It will clean up a lot of the so called “news” provided via Google and hurt their hits/ad revenue in the process. It’s naive to think his competitors won’t take advantage of this. Doesn’t Murdoch realise that he has devalued his own product over the years and now most of his tabloid news comes from the people and the internet – so he is the one getting content “free”. People don’t care where they get general celebrity news these days. If they want good analysis of stories they’ll go direct to specialised sites and more often than not these days they are independant web sites set up by journalists sick of the big media players. The paradigm has changed and Murdoch doesn’t still doesn’t get it. Let him cut of his own nose…
Layoffs hit The Washington Post after BusinessWeek, AP
Several media reporters wrote on Twitter on Thursday that this was one of the worst weeks in journalism, and it’s hard to argue with them. BusinessWeek is canning a third of its staff as Bloomberg gets ready to buy the magazine. The Associated Press is laying off 90 people as part of its effort to cut payroll costs by 10 percent this year.
And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.
The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That’s not as big a number as other places you’ve read about lately, but it’s still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)
Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don’t want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.
Why is this happening? Here’s what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:
As part of the work we’re doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.
The background: The Post’s web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.
This place is an absolute joke. The paper is dying, not slowly but fast and it’s all of the Senior managements fault. The worst generation of the Graham family.
Talking with Thomson Reuters chief about print
Covering Thomson Reuters Corp for almost two years has taught me that people like to cast my company in a recurring role in media deal parlor games. Now that the company’s arch-rival Bloomberg LP will buy BusinessWeek magazine from McGraw-Hill, lots of my pals in the media world are wondering: Will Thomson Reuters buy a mainstream news or business news magazine? Or newspaper? Why not Forbes? Why not the Financial Times?
Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)
I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company’s third-quarter financial results.
Here is what he said:
Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part… I don’t see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.
Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can’t help it, I’m a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:
Here is Glocer’s reply:
SC NJ: Thanks for reading – and commenting. I did not include a quote from Glocer where he referred to PDR and similar properties. That said, I asked him about mainstream news and business newspapers and magazines, so that’s the context in which he answered the question. I don’t think you caught him out.
Robert
Boston Globe publisher retires after paper nearly dies
Fifty-six. Is it the new 65? Ask Steven Ainsley, the 56-year-old publisher of The Boston Globe. He is retiring, parent company New York Times Co said on Thursday, after three years as publisher. His successor is Christopher Mayer, 47, who joined the globe in 1984.
In the press release, the Times Co noted the two Pulitzer Prizes that the Globe won under Ainsley’s reign. It didn’t mention that other thing that happened this year, which was the Times threatening to close the paper unless unions buckled and agreed to millions of dollars in concessions to stem outrageous operating losses that could have hit $85 million this year. It also didn’t mention the layoffs, the closing of the Globe’s international bureaus and the attempts to sell the Globe for next to nothing after buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion.
But those are details.
The Globe’s story says that Ainsley is considering nonprofit work after the Times. All we can add is: Isn’t that what you’ve been doing at the Globe?
Here are a few excerpts, meanwhile, from the Globe story:
Ainsley said he was glad to have seen the Globe through to a stronger financial position. “It’s been difficult but enormously gratifying,” he said. “Clearly we’ve had a lot of work to do here this year. I think we’ve made extraordinary progress in getting the Globe on sound financial footing.” Mayer, a native of upstate New York and a graduate of Yale University, said he is enthusiastic about the Globe’s prospects. “It’s a big challenge but it’s also a great opportunity and a great institution,” Mayer said.
Asked whether he anticipates making changes at the paper, he said the Globe has “very talented people,” and that he and his team will be working on strategies to take the Globe into the evolving digital era.
Thanx for the valuable information. This was just the thing I was looking for, I think he did a great service to the paper… more then any1 else could…. keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.
How I learned to stop worrying and love bad newspaper news
We had a hard time finding the good news in Monday’s report that U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen more than 10 percent, based on an analysis of 379 daily papers. Thank goodness for the newspapers whose publishers helped them understand why losing hundreds or thousands of paying readers is good.
Most papers acknowledged deep declines in circulation, but explained it in one of the following ways:
- We had to clear out all the bulk copies sold at discount. (I’m still not sure how this one works because I recall publishers saying this a couple of years ago. How many deadwood readers are there?)
- We shrank our coverage area so of course we lost some circulation. It tells advertisers that they’re getting a BETTER quality of reader.
- We’re charging more for the paper so circulation revenue has risen, and anyway, who wants to rely on a business as fickle as advertising (the one that lined our owners’ pockets for the past 150 years.)?
- Readership is rising on the Internet.
- At least we didn’t get whacked as bad as the next guy.
All these statements are true, and they all are good business moves. What I can’t find among the numbers is what percent of print decline at many of these papers is because of the other reasons that you hear from people. Some are legitimate, some aren’t and some are just silly. All say one thing: Many people don’t pay for the paper anymore, which means there’s less money to keep them in business. (Don’t believe us? Ask the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):
- I hate my newspaper
- My newspaper doesn’t have anything interesting in it
- News is boring
- News is free on the Internet
- My newspaper is biased to the right/left/middle/other Little League team than the one my kid is on
- My paper stopped running Garfield in the funnies. It doesn’t run Hints From Heloise anymore.
- You can’t get good TV listings anymore
- I don’t care about anything that happens in the rest of the world or outside my front door.
- There’s not enough local/regional/national/world news here.
- The sports section sucks.
- It always arrives too early/late for me to read it.
Here are samples of how some papers handled Monday’s news:
San Francisco Chronicle headline: Chronicle’s strategy shift starts to pay off
Pointer:
1. Thanks for contributing to the recursion, but I disagree.
2. They pay me in the news business to cover the news business.
3. There are people inside and outside journalism who say that news outlets shouldn’t cover themselves and shouldn’t cover the news business. They say that it bores the reader and that it is essentially writing for a small group whose emotional and professional inbreeding are well known.
4. I disagree with that. Covering the news business now, as everything about it changes and threats to its survival mount, is an exciting story to tell people. I also believe that you can promote transparency and trust in news organizations by telling the public in an easy-to-understand way how the business works. You don’t have to go to the grain-by-grain level of Editor & Publisher; you should write, as I constantly say, stories that Mom can understand, whether she’s a high school dropout or a PhD. This is necessary now more than ever as more people harbor paranoid, fearful mistrust of the news.
Los Angeles Times staffers fear more layoffs coming
We feel like we’ve read this bad news before. Our sources tell us that they are expecting another round of layoffs in the Los Angeles Times newsroom. They said that people thought a few dozen editorial staffers could get their walking papers this week, though someone else close to the paper whom we spoke cautioned that amount was too extreme.
The paper hasn’t scheduled any meetings or circulated any memos, the sources said. In other words, all this could change. A Times spokeswoman declined to comment.
The blog Laobserved.com, which follows the Times closely, reported that at least one reporter, Tina Daunt, has posted on her Facebook page that she has been canned. “More expected through the day,” the blog also reported.
The LA Times is part of Tribune Co, the bankrupt, Chicago-based newspaper publisher and television broadcaster that also owns the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Times are tough at Tribune’s newspapers, as well as other papers around the nation.
USA Today and many other papers are set to report big declines in circulation next Monday (though some of that is actually a good thing, which we’ll explain in a subsequent blog post), and publishers such as Gannett Co Inc and McClatchy have been making their quarterly numbers only because of big cost cut — of which layoffs are a major part. The New York TImes, which has the largest newspaper editorial staff in the nation, said on Monday that it will slice 100 jobs through buyouts and maybe layoffs from its newsroom. The Charlotte Observer, a McClatchy paper, is offering buyouts too.
– Additional reporting, writing, nattering by Robert MacMillan in New York.
(Photo: Reuters)
New York Times job cuts: Read the memo
The New York Times will cut 100 positions in its newsroom by the end of the year, Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff on Monday. This is the second time that the paper has taken this unfortunate step, having cut 100 positions last year (though, as Richard Perez-Pena reported in his story on nytimes.com, other positions were added so it was not a net reduction). Thing is, the TImes already cut pay for journalists and other employees this year in an attempt to forestall cuts. So… it’s not good news, but it is fit to print. Here is Keller’s memo:
Colleagues,
I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I’ve been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don’t want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.
Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.
We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.
As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.
Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.
At Chicago Sun-Times, portrait of a newspaper investor
It’s not every day that you get people who are anxious to tell you that they’re investing in newspapers, that great industry sector that took a swan dive into an empty swimming pool over the past couple years. Private equity firms that are getting into that game again are just that — PRIVATE.
The latest buyers of the Chicago Sun-Times and parent company Sun-Times Media Group identified themselves on Friday, however, and we’d like to share their names with you too. Good luck with the newspaper game.
- Jim Tyree, Chairman and CEO of Mesirow Financial, Managing Member, Sun-Times Media Holdings, LLC
- Andrew Agostini, Principal and Owner, J.L. Woode Ltd.
- Kevin Flynn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Emerald Ventures, Inc.
- Ed Heil, Investor and Entrepreneur
- Michael Mackey, Senior Managing Director, Insurance Services, Mesirow Financial
- William Parrillo and Robert Parrillo, Private Investors
- Richard Price, President and Chief Operating Officer, Mesirow Financial
- Ed Ross, Principal and Owner, J.L. Woode Ltd.
- W. Rockwell “Rocky” Wirtz, President, Wirtz Corporation
- Bruce Young, Vice Chairman, Mesirow Financial
The Sun-Times’s website, by the way, has some mugshots. The rival Chicago Tribune tells us that the list is “studded with colorful Chicagoans.” Hopefully Saturday’s newspaper story will say why they are. I’m not a Chicagoan myself, so I’m relying on you readers to tell us why these people are colorful.
I am a European and while reading NYT I care only about 8-9 articles every week. Everyday I receive NYT headlines by mail and usually I read one or two articles put in the “top stories”. Generally speaking I think that frontpage articles have to be free. Frontpages are like shop windows. Do you want access to a newspaper on the whole? Pay it! NYT has to lose his influence in the world, that is bad news to journalism.