I couldn’t help but notice the sudden outcrop of advice
columns in the printed edition of The New
York Times. The Times now has
five weekly advice columns, one each for etiquette, job issues, ethics, real estate matters and
consumer complaints, at least to my count. Who knows, maybe I’m missing one.
These columns are cheap to produce—the readers create half
the content with their questions and the other half—the answers—are almost
always warmed-over information or packaged homilies. There is no difference
between these columns and the syndicated columnists like “Hints from Heloise”
or “Dear Abby” that local newspapers have published for at least a century. I
can remember when the Times had no
advice columns, which typically are a staple of local and regional newspapers.
Then for years the only advice column in the Times was the “Ethicist” in the Sunday magazine.
The front page of the Times
is now also different from what it used to be, focusing very little on breaking
news except for the very big stories like the Charlie Hebdo massacre or revelations that the Times investigative reporters have dredged up like the collapse of
the market for taxi medallions. Instead, the front page contains analysis of
news that happened earlier in the week, investigative pieces and high-end
gee-whiz features. I suppose that the assumption of the editors is that you
already know what the news is from perusing the Internet.
The print edition of the Times
carries less news than ever before, and for most international and real
non-political national news, is relying more on the Associated Press and other
wire services than ever before.
Pick up a Times
and if you’re older than 40, the first thing you’ll feel is the lack of heft to
it. It kind of feels like a good regional newspaper from the 1990s. You know,
something like the St. Louis Dispatch
or the Syracuse Post-Standard, with
lots of local columns, frequent award-winning investigative reports and advice
columns from national and regional experts. Of course, these regional papers
typically used columnists from the Times,
Washington Post and other national newspapers, whereas reading the Times, you got to see Charles Blow, Paul
Krugman and Gail Collins a day early. No more, since you can easily find their
columns on the Internet the day before the print version hits the streets.
I was enumerating these signs of the decline of what was
once the greatest mainstream newspaper in the United States to someone the
other day when she asked me what I would do differently if I owned the Times.
My response is that the Times
management made all its mistakes early in the Internet game by buying into the
nonsense that just because it’s on the Internet, it has to be free. If I had operated the Times at the dawn of the information age, I would have done the
following:
1.
Charged the same amount to see the newspaper on
line as to receive a home delivery.
2.
Not given any free samples to visitors to the
website.
3.
Offered the newspaper or selected articles to
various Internet news portals such as Yahoo! and Google News on a strict pay-for-usage
basis.
4.
Hired a bevy of sharp minds to surf the net for
copyright infringements and prosecute all of them aggressively. By copyright
infringement, I don’t mean referencing articles or quoting from them in other
news media and blogs, but printing an article verbatim without permission and
payment.
5.
Given free subscriptions to the online edition
of the Times to every public library
and public school library across the country.
In other words, I would have defended the castle, which in
this case means asserting that the basic value of the newspaper is not in its
paper or electronic imagery but in the information it contains. In effect, I
would have had the Times say, “We can and will translate the value
of the information we gather to dollars and cents and set a price on it. But we
will always provide those who can’t afford direct access to the newspaper a
free way to still get the information.” Sounds like the traditional
relationship that news media has had with the economy and the community.
Taking the approach I suggested might have hurt the Times profit margin for a while, but newspaper
profit margins were notoriously fat, so I imagine the owners could have afforded
it. I’m convinced that the rest of the publishing industry would have followed
this same strategy for transferring the media to the Internet, if the Times and other big media players would
have shown them the way.
Although implementing this harsh approach would cost
billions more today than it would have if the news industry had started with it
18-20 years ago, it could still be done. But instead, the Times and virtually all other American newspapers prefer to
continue to slide—following fewer news stories, doing more rehashes and relying
more on news services. It wouldn’t matter if Internet media were replacing the
traditional print and broadcast media in covering and uncovering the news. But
it’s not. The Internet relies more on quoting secondary news sources and giving
commentary than even the daily newspapers.
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