
Inaugurating the New York Times Deathwatch - drm237
http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/02/inaugurating-th.html
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mynameishere
He criticizes them for not having internet-savvy people on the board, but the
nytimes has a perfectly good, very popular website. I forget the statistics,
but it gets something like 50x as many readers as the paper, and about 1/50th
the revenue. The internet isn't going to save the print business.

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SwellJoe
"50x as many readers as the paper, and about 1/50th the revenue"

The question, of course, is how do they fix this problem...not "How do we
continue to pretend that the print business will always be there?"

They've got a great technology team on the ground--see some of the recent Open
Source announcements from them. But, obviously, they don't know how to make
money on those 50x readers. I don't either...but they're going to have to
figure it out, or die a slow death.

~~~
apathy
> they're going to have to figure it out

Or be acquired by someone who has. This is not rocket surgery.

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robg
Agreed, the rundown of the board is hilarious. And that criticism is spot on.
Amazing really when their future will make or break based on their digital
transformation.

As my main news source, I'm mostly satisfied by the coverage. While the
Sulzbergers may get the most from the editorial mouthpiece, I don't see their
influence on the main stories of the day. As the coverage tilts toward
politics, I assume a bias, but the columnists help a bit there. Safire has
essentially been replaced by Kristol though that to me seems to be more a sad
reflection on the current status of American conservatism than on "The Paper
of Record".

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patrickg-zill
He's kind of late to the party, given that others have been pointing out the
various problems with the NYT for years.

The main problem they have is that they can no longer truly frame themselves
as the "newspaper of record".

They have been too partisan for too long on the political front, and the
quality of their writing has declined too far, to be taken seriously as the
"best" newspaper.

The purple prose, the injection of the writer's too-cute witticisms and
observations into what should be factual reporting, and their sometimes quite
odd choices of what to run on the front page, have finally caught up with
them.

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gojomo
The rundown of the 13 mostly-inappropriate board members is the best part.

But would a good board even be possible and effective given the Sulzberger
family control, through a dual-class voting structure? Do the Sulzbergers
really want the NYTimes to be a profit-making enterprise, or do they get
enough satisfaction out of it being the de facto mouthpiece of the bien-
pensant establishment?

And might Google someday become ossified in the same way, given that it has a
similar dual-class voting structure?

