funny story. I used to live in a medium sized city in France. The mayor once bought all the prints of a satirical journal the day they published a story about corruption in this city.
You would think that it would be easy to do a reprint but some shops were too afraid to buy those again. The mayor is still in charge of the city.
I coincidentally happen to be staying as a guest at a house that gets NYT print delivered every morning... and I spent a good 30 minutes reading it this morning (reading a print paper is still a pleasure even though I don't do it much; lots of interesting articles in Business today)...
And I totally didn't notice. Shows how much attention I give to the ads I guess.
When I saw this here on HN, I thought wait, really? Went to look at the paper -- yup, I just didn't notice. What an odd coincidence that I happened to have a print NYT on hand when I saw this on HN.
Reminds me of Apple’s November 1984 buyout of Newsweek. It was hyper focused on showing people the original Macintosh, mostly to people who had never consider the need for a computer.
Very different to GE trying to explain why a troubled but long standing NYSE conglomerate is unbundling itself.
And thanks to ublock origin and the steven black hosts list, I won't see a single one of GE's NYT ads, or pretty much any other ads from anyone, anywhere. Life is good!
[EDIT: although the HN title doesn't convey it, GE also bought out "most of [the NYT's] premier digital advertising real estate." ]
It’s common to say buying ad space. You have probably regularly heard an advertiser “buying a full page”. No one’s ever “bought” the whole thing, so the confusing language of saying “buy” in this context never came up before.
I thought either this, or GE provided all of the content for an entire issue. I don't think I've read more than one or two physical newspapers in my entire life (I'm 34), so maybe "buy out" is some term of industry I'm not familiar with that makes sense to others who do read newspapers?
Hm. On the one hand, I find this pretty cool. A singular-focus media campaign, and from what I read one that could actually provide some educational and entertainment value. Might be a good step by GE in terms of managing brand awareness and identity.
At the same time I'm a bit concerned by the influence advertisers and their interests have on media in general. Catering to advertisers does not always seem to align with the possibly more intrinsic goals and values of a newspaper, for example. Or what I would want from a newspaper.
This has been a concern since at least the 80s, when Manufacturing Consent discussed this very problem.
The good news is that the New York Times is making a much higher proportion of its revenue from readers (thanks to the growth in digital subscriptions), while advertising revenue is much lower than it used to be, so, whatever effect it did have, it should be less now.
Good news is that the NYT doesn’t get biased by the ulterior motive of depending on advertisers for revenue. Bad news is that the NYT does get biased by the ulterior motive of pandering to their subscribers.
My Roper washer (cheapest option at the time, I had never heard of them) died last week. This time, GE was the cheapest option. In a few years I expect to have a Samsung that will require a subscription to run heavier loads.
I can't speak to their washers, but I've been pleasantly surprised with my Haier refrigerator. I needed a very specific width to fit my kitchen, and theirs was pretty much the only not-obscenely-expensive option due to being a non-standard size.
It has gone without any need for repair far longer than other new refrigerators my extended family has bought, but it also doesn't have an ice maker or water filter- just a really dumb refrigerator and freezer that (knock on wood) Just Works.
Refrigerators may be the one market in which the Chinese (Haier, at least) have a better reputation than the Koreans. The consensus (based both on what I've seen online, and a refrigerator repairman I consulted) is that Samsung and LG refrigerators are trouble-prone.
Avoid the Samsung dishwasher. I own one and it is crap. Buy a Bosch instead. There have been a few HN threads about appliances; Samsung is generally regarded as being crap.
>If you bought their stock any time after 1997 you've lost money on that trade
Regardless of what you see on that chart, this is not correct at all.
I bought in October 2020 when the price began to bounce up or trend up from a long-term low. I am up on that investment more than 25% as of this morning. I also bought Ford just as their stock began to bounce off of the lows in early 2020 and am doing well on it too.
Your performance on any stock purchase is strongly tied to the date you purchased it and the health of the company at the time. I watched these stocks of old-school conglomerates decline as people moved money to new tech offerings. These companies are not going anywhere so I bought when the price movement confirmed a new up trend and have held since.
I did the same thing years ago with Corning in late May of 2002, when at the time, they were the only company on earth that produced the glass for LCD display monitors and they produced most of the fiber-optic cable and the pc industry was beginning to recover while entities everywhere were planning to upgrade fiber-optics after the huge dot-com bust. I paid just over $1/share as it built the right side of the cup pattern on a big bounce. Corning survived of course and went on to continue to dominate glass-making with Gorilla glass being nearly ubiquitous in consumer products not to mention their huge fiber-optics production.
GE used to be into everything. They have shed a lot of under-performing or non-aligned assets but they still have a huge role in diesel-electric locomotives, jet engines, etc.
They will spin off a few things but that only allows them to improve focus.
At least GE has real products to spin off.
Many of these new tech VC-backed XaaS operations (some of which I have occasionally invested in) have nothing more than slippery marketing ploys pitched to gullible, cash-rich investors who have money to burn.
Maybe if you bought and held it, but there were plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck in recent years. Before the split the stock was down to like $5-$6 in 2018 and doubled in the price in part to the work that Culp has one.
Didn't GE spin out or sell a lot of their business after that time? So you would have to look at the stock price for all of those spun out businesses too.
(EDIT: and also any dividend they may have paid out over that time period.)
idk about culturally but financially theyve been decimated from their former self. It was a very large conglomerate and they strategically kept certain parts and spun off others so there probably is a resilient business or two in there somewhere but it will mostly likely always be a shadow of its former self.
All I know is, a bunch of former GE people came over to a former company and basically tanked our engineering department. The engineers that migrated were successful overall (not 100% good hires, but definitely more than 50%), but all of the management that switched were terrible. It doesnt help that one of those managers also took over the Director of Engineering position, so had an outsized impact.
> The paper will be delivered Tuesday to The Times' 330,000 weekday print subscribers, and will also be available on newsstands.
330k subscribers on Twitter would be..what, a D-list influencer? I think of NYT as the preeminent newspaper of America. Granted, we're talking quantity versus quality. It's still jarring to consider the audience of individuals versus a media conglomerate nowadays.
This is the real situation - you can see it most obviously in the view count of Youtube personalities that may still have millions of subscribers but only 10k+ views on their latest videos.
Even if half the NYT papers go directly into the recycling without being opened, that's still going to be a larger reach than similar-counted twitters.
> Half of those subs will be bots and another 25% will have forgot they even subbed to that person. Very different from paying real money every month.
Also you can expect newspaper subscribers are paying a lot of attention to the paper's article, while a follower may be barely paying attention to any account they follow.
Additionally, newspaper articles probably drive a lot of tweets in ways that are difficult to measure fully.
key to this is 'print,' though. NYT reaches far more people digitally these days - I think it's around 10 million. (and then plenty of folks see articles that aren't subscribing.
Yup. And the NYT probably brings in more income from web ads than print ads.
The print ads probably don't cost nearly what they used to, since they reach so many fewer people, which is probably also part of the story of this being the first time someone paid for every print placement in an issue. 30 years ago it would have cost ridiculous sums of money, today it's much less.
(although the OP also says "in addition to most of its premier digital advertising real estate", so I don't know. when I go to nytimes.com without an ad-blocker, the first two ads I saw were for Ford; and "ruggable", the latter of which is definitely targeted to my personal tracked history. But clicking around more then I saw a huge GE one.)
I don't have the numbers at hand, but I recently read an article that said in the USA total market, far more money is currently spent on web ads than on all traditional media (including newspapers, magazines, and television too). Which, of course, has a lot to do with how newspapers are kind of dying...
We're talking about GE and their efforts to turn a big, inefficient company into smaller, more efficient companies. In that sense, this ad campaign is already an overwhelming success.
I thought, reading the title, that GE had bought the entirety of NYT, but it sounds like they only bought the entirety of their advertising space for one issue.
Is "print paper" a common term for advertising space?
