The (Not So) Bleak Future of The New York Times
Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!
Emily Nussbaum at the New York Magazine profiles the Interactive Newsroom Technologies team at NYTimes.com –
A group of developers-slash-journalists, or journalists-slash-developers, who work on long-term, medium-term, short-term journalism. … (a team that cuts) across all the desks, providing a corrective to the maddening old system, in which each innovation required months for permissions and design… (coders elevated) into full-fledged members of the Times—deputized to collaborate with reporters and editors, not merely to serve their needs.
– and wonders if such innovations can save NYT.
In another interesting piece, Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic Magazine imagines a post-print NYT –
Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. The remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.
– even as he speculates that NYT may go bankrupt as early as May 2009.
Rick Edmonds at Poynter disagrees –
I don’t begrudge Hirschorn his meditation on a future in which print’s role is minimal or disappears. I don’t happen to think, as he does, that Huffington Post, with its mix of unpaid opinion blogs, news lifted from elsewhere and hype, is the model.
How about getting your political news from Politico, your sports news from ESPN.com, your showbiz news from EW.com, your international news from an assortment of options, and your local news from somewhere to be determined? In short, the news would come from professionally reported and edited sites with standards — just not the single unifying standard of The New York Times or other quality publications.
It all may come to pass within a decade or sooner. Not, however, at The New York Times in May.
I think that all three of them have got a part of the future right. We will have a profitable (or non-profit) online-only version of NYT sooner than we expect it, and it will depend heavily on interactive features, blogger-journalists offering expert opinion, and editor-curators aggregating the best of third party sources like ProPublica (national politics), GlobalPost (international news) and TechCrunch (technology news), along with user generated content.
Even though it may not have a paper version for long, the future of NYT may not be so bleak after all.