![]() Digital startups that at one time seemed to threaten the Times’s dominance have vanished or at least dramatically reined in heady plans over the last few years. The Times has just two real national competitors, both of which have similar problems with an aging subscriber base, but which also have the luxury of different support structures: The Wall Street Journal depends on an affluent business audience and their employers to pay for subscriptions the Washington Post depends on owner Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world.Īnd beyond that there’s … not a lot. I also don’t think there’s a better strategy available to the Times, which remains an American journalism unicorn - with enormous resources and a wealthy audience that will fund those resources and buffet it from the perils of an advertising market. Even if you’re fortunate enough not to live in a news desert, you understand why local news isn’t just important for people who like news, but for people who value democracy. ![]() “I think it’s huge.” The New York Times’s executive editor Dean Baquet on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2018. “I think the biggest crisis in journalism in America is the crisis of local news,” Times executive editor Dean Baquet told me five years ago. Now they are competing with the Times - whose editorial leadership has spent years bemoaning the fragile, shrinking state of local news. Those papers have spent the last few years competing with the Athletic for sports fans’ time and money. The Times strategy also poses a risk to outsiders - like the people who work at local newspapers around the country, and the people who depend on those newspapers to tell them what’s happening in their communities. It is also pouring money into add-on services like games, a cooking section, and an audio arm. There’s the money, for starters: The Times’s recent acquisition of the Athletic, the sports news startup that caters to a younger and more centrist subscriber than one who pays for the Times, will cost it more than $600 million - more than half of the cash hoard the Times has built up during its boom times. So even while the Times is thriving, its managers - led by CEO Meredith Kopit Levien - are busy trying to create a new kind of Times, one that sells news and a lot of other stuff. It also wants different kinds of subscribers. Which is why the Times is trying to build and buy new products to augment its core newspaper subscribers. But it’s very top of mind for the Times’s business team - who won’t say that publicly but discuss it often internally, sources tell me. ![]() This doesn’t seem to bother many of the people who work on the editorial side of the paper. They remain older, richer, whiter, and more liberal than the rest of America. That strategy allowed it to thrive for the past decade while the rest of the news industry convulsed.īut while the Times has succeeded wildly at getting people to pay for its journalism, it has not succeeded at transforming the kind of people who pay for the Times. Instead of collapsing under the weight of digital competition, the paper transformed its business model, and now relies on money from its readers instead of advertisers. Not coincidentally, it’s also a rare journalism business success story. The New York Times is a marvel of journalism.
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