This series is really good. The fact that the nytimes is bleeding money while still producing content of this quality is a sad state of affairs. Must be a better way to monetize this stuff.
It seems like they're aggressively paying down debts and resolving union related costs. Based on their quarterly reports they seem to be doing okay in terms of cash on balance sheet and revenue vs costs of production. Their major concern long term is still valid - 74% of their revenue comes from print advertising. They need to significantly grow the digital side of their business, and reduce their overall costs.
One reason why so few people are willing to pay for good content is that there is so much of it. If the NYT goes goes broke and stops publishing, or puts their stuff behind a paywall and consequently goes broke and stops publishing, people don't care, because there's dozens and dozens of other publications with the same quality competing for their attention. Along with, of course, a whole internet full of click-bait, zero research garbage, but that is sort-of beside the point: there is free quality journalism to be had elsewhere, in such seeming abundance that I can't say that this carefree attitude by readers is short-sighted.
Another thing is that the manner in which journalism is consumed has changed fundamentally: we pick and chose individual articles from a variety of sources instead of reading or skimming through one publisher's entire newspaper for any given day. In other words, it's not even the NYT that's competing for attention with other publishers, it's any given article that's competing for attention with any other article.
It's possible that I'm not giving the NYT and their ilk enough credit: while I think there's no debating there's an overabundance of thoughtful, well-written long- (and short-) form content out there -- more of it alone on HN that I'd have to quit my job to read it all -- I'm open to the suggestion that much of it is still different from what newspapers like the NYT do, or strive to do, particularly in terms of dedicated research and fact-checking.
If that's the case, and there remains a demand for this kind of content as opposed to content that's "just" well-written and thoughtful, maybe at some point before it's gone it'll be rare enough that people will start paying for it.
Briefly: the NYT has no true peers, which is why it's called "The Paper of Record." Nationally, globally and locally, it plays an indispensable civic role, to say nothing of its value qua "content on the internet." Much of their reporting shapes the conversations that define many, many dimensions of contemporary life, and if they were to disappear quite a bit of important truth would go uncovered. Journalism is not merely something to be consumed, it is a necessary part of the social ecosystem. The New York Times is too big to fail, and is easily among the most important corporations of any size, period, despite it's small capitalization.
edit: for what it's worth, my father was a journalism professor and sometimes-head of one of the top journalism programs in the US, so I grew up hearing a lot about this sort of thing!
Perhaps in the US it is considered the paper of record. In the land of shoddy journalism it is pathetically easy to be the best print paper. However, the rest of the world has significantly better news and papers- Spiegel, Le Monde, FT, Economist, Haaretz.
I read three out of those five plus the Times, and I am not convinced they're significantly better - in the contrary, the New York Times does a lot of things better.
There are some advantages these papers have - for example, Haaretz is more willing to put good analysis on its (web, Hebrew-edition) front page, but I think that reflects an American culture of journalistic caution about mixing even vaguely editorial content with news, which I generally enjoy. (e.g. however much I disagree with the WSJ editorial board, I generally regard their news as credible and well-reported; I cannot say the same about e.g FAZ's straight reporting on Greece.
Perhaps it would surprise you that we have those publications here in the US too. You might also be surprised that the rest of the world has the New York Times.
While Der Spiegel and Le Monde have both broken many major stories (I believe the participated in the Snowden publishing along with the Guardian and the NYT), Does the Economist do any investigative journalism? There's some nice commentary on news, but I've never heard of anything break by them
If you're going to include The Economist then you should also include states-side The Atlantic, New Yorker and increasingly Vice. There's also the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.
I think part of the New York Times' problem is that they're trying to keep both parts of the business alive, but the two ad channels compete with each other. At some point I would hope that the family controlled board decides to go all in on being a digital-only press. Everyone works remote, with small regional offices as necessary. They retain their artists, photographers, editors, writers, and other content producing staff. They retain their existing technology team that works with the editorial team on the cool features as was posted.
The print business and assets are spun out as a separate company providing white label newsprinting services (perhaps as The New York Times Print Services Company), and eventually sold.
I think they can continue to run the dual mode business for 5-10 more years, but eventually the numbers on print won't make sense anymore.
It would also be nice if people would re-think their mental model about where content comes from and who pays for it. I hear about so many people blocking ads and whatnot - and I understand why - but you don't really see these same people evangelize subscriptions or otherwise supporting these places.
Of course, ad blocking is only one aspect to lower digital advertising revenues, but so many people complain about paywalls and whatnot, yet nobody seems to have any good solutions.
Until we have a good solution, and people get over their entitlement to free (as in beer) media, outlets like the NYT and others will continue to precariously wobble near the tipping point of print's demise (and the revenue with it).
I don't see adblocks at being the problem; adblock is /mandatory/ these days on the web; for the 0.01% website that deserve the revenue, the rest is there to abuse it, put autoplay flash, full screen popups, tracking cookies and all they can possibly /can/ on you.
The other problem is the 'monetisation'; it seems everyone around wants £10 a month. Sorry, I might pay £10/m for netflix that I use often, but do I want to pay that to everyone that I use twice a month, or even sometime a lot less? Well, nope.
Not only that, but registering and paying makes you even more marketable, where your viewing habits and so on can get sold on to 'partners'.
I don't /mind/ paying for content, and I don't /mind/ ads, it's just the abusive nature of how it's done these days that I mind.
No, it really is not. Ad-blockers are run by a minority of users, and the vast majority simply use whatever browser camne with their PC, or maybe download Chrome. But installing ad-blockers, GreaseMonkey scripts, Firefox extensions and the like basically never crosses the mind of your average web content viewing public. [1]
I'm not sure I'd count the adverts I see as 'abusive' either. Many times I have found ads useful, interesting, curious or (on YouTube videos) worth watching without skipping. Just as with TV and newspapers, yes, there is much crass, unsubtle, and badly created advertising. However, it's all ignorable, and even if a site pops up an inter-stitial advert, I've yet to come across one that I cannot close and move on to the content. Of course, pop-ups that tell me I have read all the free content I am allowed are different, and in those cases I make a choice - do I want to read the article enough to pay for it?
As for wanting GBP 10 per month, I would spend much more than that on physical newspapers (at 50p per issue, the 'i' is one of the cheapest, so that's about GBP 15 per month) so it seems pretty reasonable. And I don't expect my copy of the Guardian to have no adverts because I paid for it, as opposed to reading it in the library. In fact, again, I find the adverts can often be useful and informative, even in such a widely targeted medium as a single newspaper.
[1] full disclosure - I have never used or installed an ad-blocker, nor wanted to in my 20+ years of web usage
How do you know that it's only a minority of users that are deploying some way of blocking advertisement in their browsers?
I'm genuinely interested and I'm raising the question as you stated it as a matter of fact.
Even if you never installed an adblocker, "Adblock Plus" has been downloaded over 19.5 million times for Firefox, "NoScript" has been downloaded over 2 million times for Firefox.
Sufficient to say, there's an increasing amount of web sites and newspapers that have "adblocking detection" and suggest/beg that you disable it these days.
[1] Full disclosure, I block ads because a lot of site owners go too far. I have no hard feelings about it. Sucks to be them, but what can I do. I whitelist sites that behave and have decent/good content.
I mostly wanted to indicate that it's a bit unreasonable to assume that because one person (grkvlt) does not install an adblocker - it's safe to assume almost no one does, as insinuated
grkvlt's comment (at least by how I interpreted it).
That said, of course the usage numbers I quickly retrieved from Mozillas Add-ons for Firefox page - are not conclusive of total adblocker installment. I took two sample add-ons. There are at least a dozen add-ons just for Firefox. Even Firefox itself has adblocking capabilities by the way.
People's "entitlement" is a complete red herring. The problem is the semantics of monetizing non-scarce, non-rivalrous goods in a digital age are open-ended. Complaining about free-riding is a distraction and demagoguery.
> but you don't really see these same people evangelize subscriptions or otherwise supporting these places.
Wait, I totally do that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697153). I already subscribe to NYTimes, Spotify, Netflix, etc. and I'd love to pay a reasonable monthly fee to Google, HN, whoever else if it means getting to use their product without being spied on or sold to. Due to a sort of path determinism, everyone just assumed that everything online must be free without giving the traditional model a fair shake.
Has anyone experimented with micropayments? I'd pay a dollar or two to read an article like this now and then, but I couldn't see myself paying $200 a year for a subscription.
The good solution is subscription fees. There is no other good solution, including advertising. A media company that can't make money on subscriptions is doomed to fail (I consider turning into a clickbait-ey shithole a failure)
I block 100% of ads on desktop and mobile. I also spend ~ $350 a year (that's $30 a month) on media subscriptions, not counting individual movies, shows, books, etc. This is a sustainable model for the companies that I subscribe to.
My local paper has a subscription website, which I've paid for at times, but the thing is, they still blast you with annoying popup and animated ads even as a paid subscriber. No thanks, you can't have it both ways.
I agree that this series is great and I hope we can support more content like it!
I don't agree that the NY Times is bleeding money though, it's a rare bright spot in publishing AFAIK. They seem to run a profit every year, though their revenue does not appear to be growing[1].
I don't think they're bleeding money. They've been operating on slim margins but they are considered to be one of the few old media companies to be successfully transitioning to digital.
