A Paper Boat Navigating a Digital Sea
IT’S Wednesday morning and 39 editors have filed in to the 10 a.m. meeting in The Times’s third-floor conference room, some carrying laptops and smartphones, others with pens and notepads.
The meeting, which until recently concentrated on the printed newspaper, now emphasizes a different discussion: journalism on the digital platforms of The Times. There was praise for headlines that had contained the right words — both “Eric” and “Cantor,” in this case — to maximize online search results; a query about whether a story would be accompanied by a video; and talk about how to give a political package more weight on the home page.
There was even a half-joking reference to the readership spike that came after an initial foray on Twitter by the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, who had praised coverage of a Brooklyn funeral and provided a link.
The morning meeting is one of two large news meetings each day, with the other at 4 p.m. (For the record, of the 23 people seated around the main table, as opposed to the periphery, seven were women; two, both men, were African-American.)
The focus at the meetings, and The Times, has come a long way since the days when “what’s going on page one?” was the biggest question. Clearly, there’s an effort to make this, more than ever, an “all platforms” newsroom.
But the structural changes at The Times and in the larger media world are even more striking. And therein lies a problem that has no easy solution: how to fully transform for the digital future when the business model — and the DNA of the newsroom — is so tied to the printed newspaper.
Consider:
• The Times’s journalism reaches far more people digitally than in print. And the digital trend lines are ever upward, while print continues the downward spiral in circulation that began a decade ago and accelerated with the economic downturn of 2008.
• But print, with both advertising and subscription revenues, keeps the paper afloat. In the first quarter of this year, advertising brought in $159 million; of that, only $38 million came from digital ads, with the lion’s share from those in print.
• Digital-only subscriptions, now at about 800,000, are credited with saving the day. But keeping them growing is difficult; relying on their continued dramatic growth is an unsustainable idea.
Meanwhile, the cost of doing it all is astronomical. Yearly newsroom costs alone are more than $240 million; that supports 1,250 journalists and bureaus all over the world.
So urgent questions arise: Is the pace of change at The Times fast enough? And what does the future, both journalistic and business, look like? I can’t answer them definitively but others have taken a shot.
“In theory, The Times can get rid of print,” wrote Frédéric Filloux recently in his Monday Note blog. Steve Outing, a digital media consultant, thinks The Times would be best served by going weekly, keeping the lucrative Sunday edition only. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum finds the Sunday-only paper a likely scenario. “I’d bet something like that will happen by the end of this decade,” he wrote.
Jonah Peretti, who founded BuzzFeed, said in a recent interview that the biggest question for The Times is not how to improve its digital offerings but “why do they need to have so much revenue?” He answered it this way: “It’s because their cost structure is made for print. When you look at how much revenue comes from print and the scale of their operation because of print, the challenge that they’re facing moving forward is how do they move into a post-print world.”
That’s the most difficult issue of all for The Times. Part of the challenge is that print is in the blood of most of the journalists at the paper. Mr. Baquet has spent his whole career at newspapers, and grapples daily with making the transition.
“I’m trying not to behave like a print editor,” he told me in an interview last week. “What I’m trying to teach myself is to take that energy and dedication to other platforms.” But the purpose of Times journalism, he said, will remain the same: “We put public service ahead of everything else.”
It’s difficult to find anyone at The Times who thinks that print is going away anytime soon. And no one I’ve talked to wants that to happen. There is a great love for the traditional newspaper, including among those who are agitating most for change. Even the young journalists who are the authors of a recent “innovation report” about The Times that has garnered plenty of well-deserved attention are steeped in the world of print and sentimentally attached to it.
Amy O’Leary, for example, a member of the 10-member group that worked on the report — it was headed by A. G. Sulzberger, the 33-year-old son of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — told me that she has saved every one of her front-page stories in a white archive box, and that Times editors send reporters the metal plate from the printing plant when their first front-page story is published. She also knows full well that the future lies elsewhere.
“The important thing is that the newsroom is wrestling with these questions,” Ms. O’Leary, a 36-year-old reporter, told me.
She is right. But to move the needle fully to the digital side, The Times will also have to look hard at its newsroom expenses, with an eye toward a leaner future that doesn’t sacrifice journalistic excellence.
In order to thrive, The Times needs radical change at an accelerated pace. At a company so heavily reliant on print for revenue and on digital for the future, that won’t be easy. But it’s crucial, because for readers what’s essential is Times journalism — not its form but its survival.
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