
The thinking and dollars behind The New York Times’ new digital strategy - mantesso
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/newsonomics-the-thinking-and-dollars-behind-the-new-york-times-new-digital-strategy/
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ThomPete
I have involved in several news media attempts to go into digital and worked
on the launch of two paper newspapers that tried to make it in the early
2000's both failed spectacularly.

One of them a high quality, amazing journalists high ambitions for quality
content newspaper.

The other a free omnibus newspaper to be delivered to almost the entire
country (Denmark)

I learned something very different from both of them but I draw the same
conclusion.

News is the reporting of events. Newspapers whether digital or print is in the
business of using these events to sell newspapers so they can sell adds.

But there are several problems with omnibus news media.

\- Most traditional news media simply have too many employees.

\- So called "Quality Journalism" isn't going to save any newspapers.

\- There are too many newspapers and too many other ways to hear about the
actual event. The internet is one big news source.

\- Making money on advertising require an amount of visitors that are simply
not possible for most.

There is still room for news but it has to be either much smaller, focused and
specialized or have to be one of a few multinational news-source providers
that others can use.

The omnibus paper is dead.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I would pay a subscription for high quality local investigative journalism
(that I can read online) but I fear that it's a model that won't work until
people realize what they're missing and how much corruption can flourish if it
goes unchecked by journalists.

~~~
ThomPete
Sure so would I, but not enough people are like you and me. But thats just
part of the problem.

1) You are depending on something to actually happen. 2) You are depending on
it to be actually interesting 3) With time it will be solved with more
transparent processes in the public sphere. 4) Most of the really interesting
areas that journalists could cover today they don't have any knowledge of.
It's simply too complex and so instead you see people who are experts in their
fields report and explain.

Newspapers as a seller of events that gets interpreted by journalists and sold
to people is a dying industry.

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pgrote
I subscribe to the NY Times even though I am in Missouri. The actual weekend
subscription with digital was cheaper than digital alone.

I've been a subscriber for over a year and enjoy the morning and evening wrap-
ups delivered to my phone.

What I don't enjoy are the constant, 3 a week, emails trying to get me to add
something to the subscription. In fact, they change the offerings often enough
I have trouble differentiating what they want me to buy. lol

~~~
brazzledazzle
I get why it happens but the drive to turn every subscription and transaction
with a customer into an opportunity to "upsell" is getting tiresome.

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digital_ins
I am appalled that the combination of Digital + Print costs as much or less
than the digital subscription alone.

NYTimes, WSJ all seem to forget the basic principles of economics which
dictate a certain amount of price elasticity is essential to bring in more
customers. It seems almost punitive that digital customers pay at par with
print customers when the incremental costs for the latter are relatively so
minor.

If NYTimes is really serious about boosting it's pure digital subscriptions,
scaling back the height of the paywall is key - not to a trivial non-zero sum,
but to an amount where the pure digital customer doesn't feel ripped off.

~~~
jdavis703
The thing is the paper makes so much money from print advertising that to them
it is cheaper to print and deliver papers. It's the old trope people like to
recite about social media companies that "you're the product being sold to
advertisers." For a variety of reasons your eyeballs are far less valuable
online.

~~~
a3n
Indeed. It's why local papers deliver papers to households that don't even
subscribe. It ups the "readership" (which in many cases is really the
"throwawayership"), and they can con ad buyers into higher prices.

Similar is phone books. I used to live in an apartment building where phone
books would be dropped in front of your door at least annually (maybe more,
there are more than one phone book company). Residents would passive-
aggressively leave them out there on the walk, and maintenance would
eventually pick them up. I hadn't had a land line for years, and I got one
like all the other residents.

But the phone book company can then claim "readership" and sell ads.

And now we block ads on the last place where ads can reach us. Ads may survive
as a revenue source, but it's going to have to change in some way that most of
us can't even imagine. And it's going to have to change for "our" benefit,
because we've gotten very used to controlling that stream.

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the-dude
I am surprised there is no mention of Blendle:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/new-york-times-
dutc...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/new-york-times-dutch-
startup-newspaper-paywall_n_6053224.html)

