Will we still be reading a printed version of the New York Times in 10 years?

From PaidContent.org

Will the print version of the New York Times (NYSE: NYT)
still be around in 10 years? New York Times Chairman and Publisher
Arthur Sulzberger tackled that question following his keynote at the WebbyConnect conference this morning: “The heart of the answer must be that we can’t
care. We do care. I care very much, but we must be where people want us
to be for their information… Print is going to be here, I believe, for
a very long time.” The NYT is more comfortable than ever with
experimentation and launching services in beta, he said. “The thought
is that we have to get past the thought that it has to be perfect” on
day one. “If you’re not prepared to occasionally fail, you’re not
trying hard enough.”

Sulzberger began his keynote with some pointed words on the
worsening economy. “It is tempting to hope that what we are witnessing
is just a temporary readjustment and some massive reboot of the
financial system will solve all of our problems” but, “there is a lot
of bad debt out there.” He cautioned that something more significant is
yet to come. “What we have learned is that we will have a far better
chance of making it through” this period with a fair amount of
criticism, he added. Sulzberger then dove into a series of observations
on weaknesses and strengths he sees in journalism today and where The
New York Times is making investments for future growth.

More after the jump on content, convergence and business models…

– Content: Sulzberger: “We now compete with companies that don’t even create
content,” and yet “quality content matters enormously… it enables us to
make the decisions necessary to keep democracy alive.” Throughout U.S.
history, there has been “an inevitable flight to quality journalism”
during particularly tough times. Regardless of where people sit on the
ideological spectrum, they are thirsty for accurate information online.
Blogs and pure-digital news organizations add both “superb” and
“horrifying” coverage to the mix. “All news organizations are human
enterprises. We will all make mistakes.” What separates quality from
hyperbole is the willingness to admit to those mistakes and always
committing to improve. “The flow of false information on the web is an
increasingly powerful force and we all know that… The internet is
democratizing the narrative by fundamentally altering how information
is disseminated.” And still, there is an incredible need for
journalists and readers to maintain a historical perspective. “Every
weather disturbance is the storm of the century,” he gave as one
example of “journalistic hyperbole.”

– Convergence and business models: Before 2000, most
people talked about convergence as if media and information would come
to us on one device, but the number of devices used to access content
has multiplied. The convergence discussion today is pegged around the
end user being at the center of the experience on multiple devices. “We
call this intelligent content delivery,” and NYT is re-tooling its
operations to deliver on that vision. The newspaper’s research and
development division, which was created in 2006, is working toward that
goal while NYT searches for business models that will sustain growth
online. NYT’s goal is to attract more users, increase engagement and
drive revenue from that. One example of NYT’s shift is TimesExtra, a
new service that pulls headlines in from other news organizations and
blogs to pair with relevant coverage from NYT. The long-held
commandment in newsrooms to avoid linking to outside sites is eroding.

Post-TimesSelect: “The era of the walled garden is over… future
success on the internet is about overcoming traditional thinking.”
Another example is the NYT’s former pay wall for TimesSelect. While it
generated significant revenue for three years, the for-fee-only content
that was “hiding” the “least commoditize-able” talent at the paper had
to come down in order for the paper’s online presence to grow. ”Had the wall remained we would not be seeing the growth that we see today in our numbers. We’re up 40 percent this year… We knew we could do better by freeing up that content.”

 

As John Fund asked recently at a panel I was participating on, “Who pays for a newspaper anymore?” Very few people in the audience raised their hands and I heard back from one audience member a couple of days later who said that she cancelled her subscription to her local paper when she returned home.  Where is the value in the printed page?

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