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In a funny and incredibly sad Daily Show segment, the New York Times opened its headquarters up to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones, who questioned the value of "aged news" (pointing out nothing in the day's newspaper actually happened that day) and asked executive editor Bill Keller if the Times was making "Huffington Post money." Jones was also flummoxed by the sight of a landline phone.
The NY Times Co. lost $74 million during the first quarter; it is entertaining bids for the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million this year. (Slate's Jack Shafer wonders who will even buy the paper). Last December, the Daily Show looked at how the newspaper business was losing out to the Internet.
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That is amazing. The Times flack is clearly clueless and doesn't get the joke at all. Ditto for Keller.
"What's black and white and red all over?"
"Your balance sheet".
Tada.
Yeah, that black and white joke was brilliant, in its cruelty.
Agreed. That joke was fantastic, and unexpected!
Wow. That was pretty harsh, Daily Show. What was NYT thinking saying yes to that call?!
Dave Itzkoff posted a response piece - ‘The Daily Show’ Meets The New York Times (Times Survives)' on The New York Times website: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/the-daily-show-meets-the-new-york-times-times-survives/
I think you all got it wrong. It was a compliment. A backhand compliment, mind you. But that's the only compliment the Daily Show can give. The big rip was on Huff and other bloggers. Think about it.
And there's no way the Times would let them in without approval/oversight.
You know, jen, for a website that has NO WAY TO LOG IN ON ITS MOBILE EDITION, I would tread carefully mocking non tech savvy papers.
When Gothamist gets to blow through $1 billion in market cap, we'll figure out the mobile edition log-in issue.
But this means that I have to wait until i get to work to make snarky comments here. That is SOOO 2005.
You can login mobile via Safari on iPhone, or Opera browser via Crackberry.
yeah...and pigs might fly out of my butt.
I'm surprised that everyone is interpreting it as being so harsh. It was a compliment to the Times. Their editors may have looked a bit silly, but the piece succeeded in making the point that they are losing money because they take chances and have standards, and that the blogs are just commenting on the work they do. Leeching. Sarcasm. No, not the way idiot Scarborough interpreted it, but actual sarcasm.
No doubt that Jon Stewart and his "The Daily Show" is funny but it is not a news broadcast, it is a reaction to the news. The NY Times is a comprehensible, interesting and mostly accurate journal. The edge the TV news shows have is the immediacy of their stories. The commentary on these stories is where the newspapers excel. I also feel their journalists are better than the talking heads and biased bloggers.
And yet, and yet, reading the Times all my life has helped me to recognize good English writing. It would be sad to lose that. Also sad: the paper shrinks every few months while the price goes up. Recipe for shrinking readership?
Personally I think the Times is the last good paper in the nation. I read it every morning, print edition, despite it's 2.00 price tag.
It's well written, in-depth and excellent for world news coverage.
Why don't they just go all electronic on kindle and the web? Is that so hard?
I really don't understand this newspaper crisis. Go digital and keep your journalists. Problem solved. Right?
Tell that to the printers, delivery men, distributors, etc.
Because advertisers will pay a lot more for a print ad than web one, even now. This leads to the cruel irony that most of the NYT's revenue comes from the print edition, in spite of the fact that the print edition loses reams of money. Same goes for most papers.
Most profitable web-based media outlets are rather small operations. I heard somewhere - forget where - that NYT would have to cut its staff by 80% to be profitable if went web-only. The web just doesn't generate that much revenue, at least not yet. If it did, journalism wouldn't in the giant sh*thole it is currently mired in.
Could the kindle be the future of print? What about a readable pdf package of the paper, in full version, that could be downloaded to the iphone that you pay for.
I dunno. I think people will always need news no matter what.
I mean, the AP stays in business without pbulishing a paper, why not the Times?
The AP is a wire service, so other papers and outlets pay fees and subscriptions to use its work... that's where they make their money. They also do save a lot on printing costs... for them to survive though, the papers have to be there to buy their product. They are currently suffering though because of how blogs just link to their wire stories for free.
Also, the AP news stories go both ways. A lot of their stories essentially come from member papers. I.E. the Tampa Tribune breaks a story of national significance, then the wire will just slightly rewrite that story (giving some credit to the Tribune) and offer it to the rest of the newspaper universe. The legwork (research, writing, fact checking and editing) was done by a local newspaper... and all those local newspapers are going by the wayside.
As for why not drop the paper versions and just keep the journalists? The paper version is where the real advertising dollars come in. They can't pay the writers without the ad dollars from the print version. Money from subscriptions have never covered a substantial portion of newspaper operating costs (whether that subscription is to print versions or a kindle pdf version).
Long story short... things are not looking so good for down the road.
Plus, time is not on their side. People are growing ever more accustomed to the idea of free content. The NYT's pay-for-content experiments have all been abandoned as failures.
We might get to find out whether a democracy can function without professional journalism. Scary.
Free content works for the 'alt.weeklies' so why not the Times? You just pull it out of your advertizers who absolutely want in on the Times' readership and their wealth. Online or print, the Times could be driving their margins from the marketers instead of their readers...