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“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,”mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.
Of all the “old”media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years, the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper , Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online.
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are disappearing.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-line and off-line. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents’offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain’s Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen”journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher-after-truth boundless material to chew over.
In future, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.
hold…to account：问责，使……承担责任
circulation：发行量
extrapolation：推断
classified ad：分类广告
bode：预示
Fourth Estate：第四阶级、第四权力；新闻界的别称。
With paper ads in massive decline, legacy newspapers like The New York Times are slowly returning to the business models that dominated the ’30s—the 1830s.
The decline of print newspapers has been the sort of story that, ironically, many newspapers have trouble following for the last years. It is not breaking news, nor a violent explosion, but rather a decade-long structural shift without heroes or obvious villains.
But lately, the collapse of newspapers is looking less like a steady erosion than an accelerating avalanche. This should scare both reporters and readers—all the while, pointing to a new business model for legacy newspapers that is, ironically, their first business model. The collapse of advertising is across the board, affecting just about every broadsheet and tabloid.
Where is all of this money going? To tiny plates of glass. There is no direct comparison between The New York Times , a newspaper that pays luxuriously for reporters and editors, and Facebook, an attention arbitrage network that induces content from unpaid maker-viewers. But it illustrates the larger story most dramatically told by venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s annual slideshow: Audiences are migrating from print bundles to mobile networks and aggregators.
The mobile ad market is duopolistic, with Facebook and Google earning about half of all revenue. That still leaves a multi-billion dollar pool of money for the taking. But there are hundreds of large and thirsty animals at the water’s edge. The herd of national “newspapers”is crowded, with BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, Vox, Refinery29, Breitbart, Drudge, and dozens more newspaper, magazine, and digital-only sites attracting national audiences that are much larger than any national newspapers could have dreamed of in the 1990s. (Not to mention commercial sites like Craigslist, which have replaced the lucrative classifieds section.) Scale is a beautiful thing. But online, the business model for most of these sites isn’t about maximizing value per reader but rather about maximizing readers at a vanishingly small per-unit value.
Where do newspapers go from here? Back to readers, perhaps. In 2000, circulation accounted 26 percent of The New York Times ’revenue. By 2014, well into the collapse of print advertising, circulation’s share had grown to 54 percent, after including the paper’s growing digital subscriptions. Today circulation is 60 percent of the company and growing. About 1.6 million people now subscribe to the paper’s journalism or crossword app, and online subs are growing faster than they were a year ago.
This future of the newspaper business would serve as a corrective, returning the industry to its distant past. In Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants , he tells the story of the dawn of newspaper advertising. In the 1830s, the largest newspaper in New York City had a circulation of only 2,600, at a price of 6 cents, making it a luxury product for its time. Benjamin Day, a 23-year-old print shop owner, had the ingenious idea to sell a paper for a penny. That cent wouldn’t cover the cost of journalism and printing, but that was alright, because Day’s decided he would use the low price to attract an audience of readers that could be converted into a salable audience for advertisers. The customers were the product. His paper, the New York Sun , first appeared on September 3, 1833. Within two years, it had nearly 20,000 readers, the most of any paper in the city. Day “decisively demonstrated that a business could be founded on the resale of human attention,”Wu wrote.
The emerging business models of the Times and the Wall Street Journal are slowly traveling back in time to recover the subscription-first model that dominated the industry before the 1830s. The 1830s were a heyday of local papers; without the advent of telegraphs or telephones, news didn’t travel well. But today it’s local news organizations that are suffering the most. People in Cleveland and Dallas and San Diego have not only stopped subscribing to their local newspapers but in many cases are reading the websites of national news organizations instead of the website of their local paper.
National reporting might be stronger than ever, but the combination of print’s demise, digital advertising’s duopolistic concentration, and the geographical sorting of journalists has gutted local newspapers. Like the slow demise of print advertising itself, it is the sort of story that news organizations might be structurally designed to miss. The opposite of a sudden and shocking calamity exhaustively covered by every media organization, it is, rather, a thousand local disappearances, with nobody left to report on what has gone away.
apocalypse：毁灭之日
avalanche：雪崩
broadsheet：大幅报纸
tabloid：小报，通俗小报
arbitrage：套利
aggregator：聚合，聚合物
duopolistic：双头垄断的；双寡头的
lucrative：有利可图的
ingenious：精巧的；新颖独特的；巧妙的
salable：畅销的，可销售的
Most of today’s media “success stories”are about digitally “native”companies like Google and Facebook. Meanwhile, many of the great brands of the pre-digital era seem to be struggling for mere survival in the face of digital disruption. The rise of free, digital-only news sites and a shift in eyeballs toward social media is significantly hurting newspapers’circulation and advertising revenues. And it’s hard to think of a media segment more threatened by digital than newspapers. Yet The New York Times (NYT) has used digital innovation to maintain its quality and reached new subscription highs despite significant headwinds in the newspaper industry. Amidst these headwinds, the NYT has risen above its incumbent competitors as an example of a successful digital transformation.
This result shows the current strength and future potential of the NYT’s digital strategy to deliver substantial revenue. In order to understand the key principles behind their digital turnaround, five key themes emerged that form the basis of the approach the NYT has pursued, and which, has thus far exceeded their forecasts and expectations. These five themes are not unique to newspaper or media companies but can be applied to most companies looking for the path to successful digital transformation.
The NYT attributed the boom in subscriptions to efforts to better leverage customer data across marketing. They’ve professionalized the way in which they manage the funnel, essentially how they get people to the point where they subscribe. The NYT has become a very data-driven company. They’ve built a very productive partnership between data, technology and their partners in consumer revenue to actually put more control in their hands as well.
This type of personalized data-driven sales funnel is par for the course for digital leaders such as Google and Amazon but is typically far less sophisticated at pre-digital media companies. The benefits the NYT have delivered via this approach are instructive to those hesitating to make the investment to become world class in this area.
The mindset shift has led to far more experimentation around product development, including the NYT’s new Cooking and Crossword apps that have significantly contributed to new subscriptions. These fresh products emerged from an internal incubator group, named Beta, which has been charged with bringing to market a variety of new products.
One of the challenges of any transformation is the engrained thinking. One of the challenges in pushing forward into new terrain is being ready to see what aspects of past behavior can be abandoned because technology has moved on. The NYT has the new willingness to experiment with different formats. They’ve done that with 360 video. They’ve done that with VR. They launched an audio product called The Daily, a news podcast, a brand new format for the NYT that’s been enormously successful. It has received both in the audience that is listening to it as well as from professionals from across the industry, all kinds of accolades. One of the NYT’s bigger new product launches has been their standalone subscription-based Cooking app, which gives access to decades of recipes from their database.
Today, many companies find themselves in a situation similar to the NYT in that, while digital appears to be the future, the vast majority of revenue is still coming from legacy products and distribution channels. This leads to the question of how much focus an organization should put on the declining but still sizable legacy business and how much focus to put on digital businesses which, while future-oriented, might not yet be near the scale of the traditional business. In fact, this is clearly playing out at the NYT where although almost 70% of their subscribers are digital, almost 70% of their revenue comes from print.
The NYT has taken a bold and future-oriented approach to this conundrum, which seems to be paying off. Despite the fact that around two-thirds of their total revenue still comes from print, the NYT has put together an executive committee that spends the vast preponderance of its time discussing where the company is going from a digital perspective. The executive committee has 14 members and has assigned to an extremely skilled operator the responsibility for making sure that print stays on track. The other 13 members of the executive team are thinking first and foremost about digital.
While the NYT level of leadership focus on digital is impressive, the digital aspiration of many companies is foiled despite leadership’s desires. This is due to the failure of different teams, departments or other silos to effectively work together to create effective digital businesses. The NYT credits a big part of success to the effectiveness of collaboration across units within the organization. They now have teams actually sitting together, cross-functionally, making sure that their designers are on the team with the engineers, with the scrum masters, and constantly pushing to break down silos across different teams and business units.
This type of Kumbaya moment may sound like a fairy tale to many enterprise digital executives who may also create cross-divisional working groups and yet who still spend so much of their time in turf wars and budget battles with their colleagues. Each team in the NYT now has goals and roadmaps, which align with the vision and strategy of the company. All roadmaps are transparent and public to everybody within the company. In essence, the tactics and collaboration have evolved tremendously, and having everyone more involved in the process has really helped to build trust culturally.
But even with great process and leadership, rapidly building and testing a stream of digital products requires a modern technical stack. The NYT has been undergoing a major rebuild of many of its core tools and systems. They’ve had to undertake a big systems transformation in order to truly drive a cross-platform experience for their customers that delights.
Today, they are running the core website on six different platforms and six different code stacks. So two desktop, one tablet, one iOS mobile, one Android, one mobile web, and so it doesn’t take much to imagine how hard it is to manage future development across those stacks if that’s what the state of play is. They got about a third of their budget reserved for that underlying architecture and also completely re-architected their data environment and moved to Google BigQuery.
The NYT seems to have identified a set of effective key principles of leadership focus, cross-organizational trust, product experimentation, data-driven marketing and modern technology architecture. But perhaps more important, the NYT has figured out how to make these things a practical working reality within their specific culture, organization, and business model. Their earnings report shows clearly that their strategy is working so far. Hopefully, the details of their path to success can serve as a recipe that might apply to a wide range of other organizations.
headwind：逆风，阻力
incumbent：现任者
par：标准，常规
incubator：孵化器
accolade：嘉奖，荣誉
conundrum：难题，复杂难解的问题
preponderance：优势
Kumbaya moment：和谐时刻
[1] TIERSKY H. The New York Times is winning at digital[EB/OL].(2017-06-08)[2022-01-15].https://www.cio.com/article/230145/the-new-york-times-is-winning-at-digital.html.