Is small media the future of big media?

Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch develops an interesting proposition. What if the best 50 writers at the New York Times left the NYT, and developed their own lost cost, low overheads online start-up? Would their readership follow them? Would investors be interested?

Like everyone else I’ve watched the print media world fall apart over the last few years. The poster child for that industry is the New York Times, of course, and their many missteps in recent memory have been well chronicled. In early 2008 Marc Andreessen started a New York Times Deathwatch, and the company’s financial performance has degraded since then.

I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10% of the writers at the NYTimes just…walked out. I know it’s crazy, but let’s just explore this a bit for the heck of it.

Today the company is worth just a little over $1 billion. As recently as five years ago it was worth nearly 5x that much. You have to go back to the early 1980s to see a lower stock price.

I certainly don’t think the NYTimes is going to be shutting down any time soon. The company still pulls in nearly $3 billion a year in revenue, down just 10% or so from 2005. But massive overhead, and more than 9,300 employees, make profitability an increasingly difficult goal for The Gray Lady. Her age is showing.

Full article here.

Aged News?

Jon Stewart's The Daily Show is already writing the obituary for newspapers. Check the question here about whether the New York Times only has "aged news", and the Woodward and Bernstein questions.

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End Times
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New York Times Creates Social Media Editor

Jennifer Preston, the former editor of the New York Times regional sections, has been appointed as the paper’s first social media editor. Preston will not be handling a new section. The job, which entails coordinating the newsroom’s use of social media, sounds similar to the one Shirley Brady was hired to do when BusinessWeek Online tapped her as its first engagement editor last year. Among other things, Brady has helped the edit staff become more conversant with using Twitter and blogging, as well as working with readers on blog posts for the site. (On Twitter, Brady also pointed to other social media editors, such as LATimes.com’s Andrew Nystrom and Mathew Ingram, who is the communities editor at The Globe and Mail, as other examples of how pubs have been carving out new newsroom duties.)

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) flagship is full of very active Twitter users. Interestingly enough, the news of Preston’s appointment was first publicly conveyed by NYT deputy managing editor Jon Landman on Twitter. Incidentally, Valleywag pointed out that Preston’s own Twitter updates are private.

I spoke to Landman briefly, and he denied Valleywag’s speculation that Preston’s role will be to clamp down on the newsroom’s after several reporters revealed the details of an editorial meeting a few weeks ago using the microblogging site.

“This isn’t about policing, although that is a small function [of the social editor’s role], but as only as a matter of making things consistent. It’s not the main purpose at all,” Landman told paidContent. “It’s really just the opposite of policing. it’s about helping everybody figure out how to use social media as a tool for journalists. A number of people have discovered social media a form for marketing and promotion, but it’s also got explicitly journalistic uses. Some people in our newsroom know and use it to their advantage. Some don’t and could use that know-how.” (Landman’s staff memo on Preston’s promotion is here, via Nieman Labs)

Preston, a reporter and editor for New York newspapers for close to 25 years, is charged with developing new initiatives for the reporters to use, in terms of sharing information and reporting it. This comes as the NYT has been ramping up its social media offerings for its readers, such as the Times Wire, which provides links to the paper’s online articles and blog posts in a headline-based reverse chronological feed that updates every minute, and the second version of its Times Reader e-paper.

Link here. Thanks to Anna Daniel for pointing this out to me.

What will happen to the New York Times?

Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic speculates about what could well be an impending crisis for the New York Times, which may come as early as May this year, and what it means for newspapers and journalism more generally.

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

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Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news­paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

Most likely, the interim step for The Times and other newspapers will be to move to digital-only distribution (perhaps preserving the more profitable Sunday editions). Already, most readers of The Times are consuming it online. The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

Also see:

"End Times: A Response"

A letter from The New York Times Company