My point was that it’s not only the competition from digital media, but the competition from better advertising processes. The result benefits aside, digital ads are simply easier to find and purchase. Newspapers could keep their differentiation as long as they reduce the frictions of buying and selling their ads.

Not what newspapers think they should be, but only what they need to be. I highly doubt that any current Times person has an unfettered grip on that concept and will thus miss the mark constantly.

Once that is done they will see that the costs are a small fraction of the current ones no matter what they currently think. If you drop the costs 75%, so should your revenue drop. It will, if it survives, be a leaner animal all around.

The smorgesboard option presented here ignores the basic fact that theTimes will have to sacrifice everything to maintain the brand and build anew from there. And it wont be the “keep some information behind a pay gate.”

It will be people paying to join a community where they help define a quickly evolving media entity.

It will have smaller $$, but a tremendous number of viewers. And it will be a joy to behold whether its the Times or a snot-nosed startup who gets it done right first.

And if the Times isnt first it will wither to irrelevancy.

This seems like a classic case of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” overwhelming a traditional business model. An old-school enterprise has to maintain its old-school practices in order to keep its reliable cash cow alive. As soon as they try to switch up what they’re doing, they risk starving the cow and having nothing to show for it. Shareholders won’t stand for *that*. The problem comes when people start overwhelmingly preferring soy milk and you’re entirely invested in dairy cattle. At that point the game’s just over and your job is to maintain your dignity and go out as a good loser.

I don’t see the benefit of expending energy to “save newspapers”. People want news, others want to provide it, but why does the NYT (or any other old-model business) need to profit from the exchange? Organizations are what they are and when they try to change their DNA, they usually fail (like when United Airlines decided they were more than just an airline and bought Hertz and Westin and started calling themselves “Allegis”). If an organization doesn’t start out with adaptation and evolution at its core, it risks getting innovated out of existence by better, later substitutes.

From a business perspective, I think the best course of action for the daily newspapers is to downscope in order to stay profitable as long as possible (like a couple of the other commenters said) and when the run finally ends (next year?), be dignified enough to just curl up by the fire and quietly pass on. I’m guessing, instead, of course, they’ll start lobbying congress to keep them on life support and prop up their antiquated models and then we’ll all get to endure story after story on NPR about how society is toilet-bound due to the struggles of major newspapers. Or I suppose I could just turn the radio off.

And yes, of course, this is coming from someone stupid enough to think people were ready to pay for online content six years ago, so — you know.

Cool subject, thanks for writing it.