New York Times CEO: Advertising won’t keep us afloat

July 24, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments | |

times12The New York Times is, for some readers, a bible of news and commentary. So it’s important whether or not the Times survives the gut-churning economic changes in the newspaper business that have knocked out the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, threaten to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle, and are forcing the Times to sell off the Boston Globe. Even angry bloggers rely on the Times — who else have they got to pick on?

Bloggers may soon need to pay for online copies of the New York Times articles they hanker to berate. The rest of us will need to pay, too. In an article published today, New York Times Company CEO Janet Robinson told the Wall Street Journal that online advertising isn’t enough to support the business model. Internal discussions of how to survive are “centered on a metered model and a Times membership model with special offerings,” she said.

The revenue from somewhere other than advertising is important, as ad sales in the second quarter fell more than 30 percent. “We are putting ourselves in a position to benefit from an upturn in advertising,” Robinson told the Journal. “We’ve done a lot to structure ourselves for a successful rebound.” The Times has an in-house lab full of big flat-panel screens that attempts to mock up ways people will read the New York Times in the next 12 to 18 months.

But while the lab, according to Robinson, has helped close some ad deals, it hasn’t yet produced a solution by which the Times can stay profitable, or even stay in business. The paper’s hope is that as readers realize what they’ll lose if the Times goes belly-up, they’ll feel good about paying to read it online.

(Disclosure: Paul Boutin is a freelance contributor to the New York Times.)

[Photo by Pentagram]

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About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Why don't they consider usage billing? The blog post contains a specific example of a usage-based newspaper.
  • JAG
    I don't think charging for online reading will turn out to be a successful business strategy. Many of the NYT topics are covered elsewhere where the content is free. The internet was set up to make information more readily available to everyday users; by charging for perusal goes against the dominant trend of the basic internet service. Readers will simply seek their information elsewhere.
  • Sam
    Ah, the neive "it's got to be free because it's on the Internet argument"
  • The newspaper and magazine industry needs to look at physical print in a different light. As soon as the internet had a mass audience, the first thing they did was replicate their print editions entirely online. Now they are scratching their heads when the digital versions with high startup costs drained all the money from the print editions and today the digital editions don't make up the advertising revenues that the print editions once had.

    The NYT, especially needs to revamp it's print edition. Print is not dead. If you have the same content online for free as you do in printed format then don't be surprised when a high percentage of readers switch to the free edition. Simply stating that "well some people still like to read news on paper." That generation is thinning out.

    What the NYT needs to do is revolutionize their print edition. Give the reader a reading experience that they CANNOT GET ONLINE. Photography, in-depth stories, whole features with fold out pages, maps etc. Print something that people will buy to spend all week reading. Look at Monocle magazine. If you thumb through it, you can never duplicate that reading experience online. That's their angle, print should be a PREMIUM product. Keep NYT.com for day to day news, breaking news, blogs etc where everyone can have their soapbox.
  • J.Garcia
    Great suggestions. Personally I can't remember the last time I picked up a newspaper to get information. I often grab what I need from their website.
  • My point entirely. I grab what I need from the web but come the weekend, I still like to browse through unfiltered content in physical format. The weekend edition of newspaper are still big sellers despite the weekday editions slumping. It's a completely different reading experience.

    Great discussion anyway, I enjoy hearing other views!!!!
  • Conrad: I don't agree. I think with the advent of the internet (and its now pretty much mass availability), print is more less dead. The business structure that allowed it to function and "work" has changed too much for print to ever be really profitable again.

    I'd say within 75-100 years, everything will be online and print as we know it now won't exist.
  • <Gadget Sleuth

    I agree with you. It's easy to slow down or steer a small boat compared to a oil tanker which takes 30 miles to stop. The fact that we are already there and the past 10 years has not changed anything with relation to large media business structure was inevitable.

    I still believe there are opportunities for printed reading in more premium format.

    Of course in the next 75-100 yrs print will be dead. That's a no brainer but the next 5-10 years? Ebooks will start the downward spiral of the paperback? Mass availability really will trample on the "culture" of reading physical print?
  • I pay to read the Wall Street Journal online because it has content not available anywhere else.

    The NY Times' content is quite as unique. The majority of what you can read there is duplicated at other news sites.