Change, as every businessman knows, is the one true constant. Successful companies manage change, while unsuccessful companies are victimized by it. Michael Malone, a former journalist for the New York Times, takes a look at that paper’s sliding stock price and punctured credibility and shows us how, faced with emergent competition and the opportunity to fashion for itself a commanding niche, the businessmen of the Times made all the wrong choices.
You can mark the turn in the Times’ reputation from the early 1990s, when it began to put, on the front page, an increasing number of opinion pieces and feature reporting (most infamously, a glimpse into the apartment of William Kennedy Smith’s purported rape victim).
At first, this was dismissed as a mere pandering to the changing tastes of a readership raised on television and gonzo reporting. But it was a first glimpse of the pandering to a supposedly hipper, more sophisticated audience that would become pandemic across the Times’ pages under the threat of the Internet age…
(The) Times decided to become more timely, more hip, and more judgmental than the electronic media — when it should have become better reported, more objective, and better written; professionalism being the one arena where the new competitors would have a hard time competing.
Regular readers of alternative media – including milblogs – are familiar with the symptoms that afflict a business which pretends to a status as the “paper of record” without also shouldering that role’s concomitant responsibilities:
(You) can’t hold that title while pandering to the political and cultural views of readers on the Upper West Side. And you can’t claim “all the news that’s fit to print” when you neglect to notice that an American soldier in Iraq just won the Medal of Honor. In the old days, if the Times didn’t cover it, it didn’t happen. That insulation is long gone: if the Times doesn’t cover it, the blogosphere will — and millions of readers will starting wondering about the judgment and biases of the New York Times.
This is more than just a series of bad business decisions for which the ruling Sulzberger family is rightly being punished the market. It’s bad news for the country, or at least that earnest, intellectually active majority of it which is not embroiled in tendentious, power-for-its-own-sake shouting matches from the fringes. If the New York Times, with all of its resources and residual throw weight will not serve to honestly write the first draft of history, who will?
Don’t look at me. I’ve got a job.
Who knows, maybe what’s happening is enough to seriously jolt the shareholders to drop that “dual class” stock structure that protect the Sulzbergers and usher in new management, and better editorial direction. The Times has to adjust the, uh, times.
Too, I have some available cash in one of my 401ks, maybe I’ll snap up some of their stock…
jpr, don’t invest in this; as the old saying goes, it’s a dog with fleas.
NYT= lap dog for the dems.
Incumbent companies generally don’t do too well when faced with a disruptive technology. (This phenomenon has been very well analyzed by Christensen & Raynor in a book which I review here.) It would have taken brilliant and courageous management to bring NYT through the current situation without severe bruising–and I’ve seen no evidence that their current management is either. Plus, they’ve made it worse than it had to be via their political posturing.
“Don’t look at me. I’ve got a job.”
I seem to remember that you will soon be unemployed and available. :
From a business perspective, the media industry has of course been getting more and more crowded and more and more competitive for a long time.
So the traditional participants, like the NYT, are faced with the reality that they need to define their role and their niche more and more tightly to stay relevant to SOME group large enough to matter.
The Wall Street journal stands like a stone wall to their right on editorial policy and completely owns the business space, leaving them with a big blue state local market to pander to editorially, along with ‘arts and books’.
Abandoning “all the news that’s fit to print” was probably inevitable, as they retreat deeper and deeper into their niche. Increasingly their coverage is defined by their orientation and the interests of their blue readership.
The first draft of history? Noble, but it doesn’t sell.