Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company’s market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe.
As if that weren’t enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.
All this may explain why Sulzberger does not talk with the press.
The article focuses on a probable transition from print to internet publishing at the NYT, as though the meltdown of the newspaper publishing industry (which saw 13.5B in market value evaporate in the last two years) is simply the result of consumer preference for faster information delivery – the problem not the product, but the platform.
What isn’t mentioned is that while the New York Times, and other distinguished organs of the mainstream press have been bleeding circulation, another was inexplicably moving in a different direction;
The New York Post today surpassed the Daily News and The Washington Post to become the 5th largest newspaper in America after bucking the national trend and chalking up a whopping 5.1 percent jump in circulation.
Sulzberger makes an open admission;
There are millions of bloggers out there, and if the Times forgets who and what they are, it will lose the war, and rightly so, according to Sulzberger. “We are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust,” he says.
“We aren’t ignoring what’s happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago.
“Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” he says. “But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world.”
And with that, reveals (like so many who argue the false premise that “blogs will never replace the mainstream media”) that he still doesn’t fully comprehend what is happening to his industry.
Those “bloggers and external writers” aren’t an “online world”. Blogs, forums and other resources of the internet are a platform, a pathway for information transmission – but they are tools of the individual, not the collective.
The “external writers” Sulzberger sees are not competitors. They’re his industry’s former subscribers – media consumers no longer interested in recieving politically-filtered news from the bottom end of a one-way pipe, who no longer tolerate interference by self-appointed gatekeepers who view information as their exlusive property to frame, sanitize, analyze, and interpret as they see fit,
It’s not a war, Mr. Sulzberger. It’s a revolt.
“but they’re being dramaticaly outclassed in every imaginable respect by the progressive netroots.”
– Jose
Your feelings on display once again Jose? Aren’t you one of the leftoids often found on ‘progressive netroots’ like catnip, with it’s audience of three?
Now, here’s a challenge, prove your statement for once. Show the facts.
Otherwise all you’ve proven is that you’re a complete waste of bandwidth. And oxygen.
“they’re being dramaticaly outclassed in every imaginable respect by the progressive netroots.”
Yeah, I hear presidential hopeful John Edwards has signed a couple of the potty mouths on to work on his campaing.
How’s that working for him, lately?
All news papers should be shut down for environmental reasons.
: )
Teach them for all the headlines saying the deluge is comming.
Ha Ha loosers,
Jack Layton needs to push for this!
To nomdenet: You have a valid point. When I say they are political it does mean that they have agendas. When I say that they try to be honest (excepting the one NYTs plagerizing guy), I mean that they are trying to tell the story as they see it.
Note: I just realized I screwed up my NY newspapers. The New York Post was founded by the Federalists. It was the New York Tribune that was founded by the Whigs. Sorry about that. (See what happens when you’re in a hurry and forget to verify what you’re saying.)
Kate- “Yeah, I hear presidential hopeful John Edwards has signed a couple of the potty mouths on to work on his campaing.
How’s that working for him, lately?”
That remains to be seen but so far just fine. He’s won a PR victory by not caving to Donohue.
“Now, here’s a challenge, prove your statement for once. Show the facts.”
It’s hard to produce empirical evidence for the sucess of a blog. You could look at Technorati’s top ten, you could look at the thinning membrane between progressive blogs and the MSM, the sacking of a SONY CEO which started in large part on Boing Boing, etc. The general trend is that the progressive blogosphere is a lot more sucessful in getting its memes circulated to a wider audience. A story that appears on Boing Boing on Monday might be picked up by the BBC on Wed.
And getting picked up by the BBC is a sign of…..more inbred, same old same old.
You just do not get it Jose. The old MSM is strangling itself slowly by outputting the same old crap that no one really wants.
The way it works is a lefty makes an ignorant comment, the MSM gives it a pass and Little Green Footballs tells everyone else. NBC gives it a pass for a few more days.
enough
“they’re being dramaticaly outclassed in every imaginable respect by the progressive netroots.”
“It’s hard to produce empirical evidence for the sucess of a blog.”
– Jose
Wait long enough and they hoist themselves.
“Yeah, I hear presidential hopeful John Edwards has signed a couple of the potty mouths on to work on his campaing.
How’s that working for him, lately?” – Kate
“That remains to be seen but so far just fine. He’s won a PR victory by not caving to Donohue.” – Jose
Well, lets see Jose:
In a comment that several Catholic Democrats told The Politico they found particularly offensive, Edwards aide Amanda Marcotte asked, in a posting to her personal blog, “What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?”
The other Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, has come under fire for referring to Christian conservatives as “Christofascists” in her personal blog.
As I said, with lying dopes like Jose, wait long enough and they hoist themselves.
Dare I say it?
QUAGMIRE!!!