Could the stars be aligning for a Google-N.Y. Times merger? Dealscape — This sort of thing actually makes sense.
As the New York Times Co. is negotiating with lenders over its debt, speculation has been floating around the blogosphere, pushing the premise that Google Inc. should acquire the beleaguered Gray Lady. The thesis or, rumor, as some would put it has been around since the beginning of the year, with SpliceToday on Thursday reintroducing the idea of the unorthodox union of the stalwart of old media with the scion of new media.
But the possibility of this dream hookup is just fantasy because the owners of the Times — the Sulzberger family — for now, seem emboldened to hold on to the company for as long as it can. The Sulzbergers, however, are living on borrowed time as the family is facing pressure on all fronts to save the company, which is hemorrhaging as the slow economy has decimated its advertising and subscription revenue. Already, the media company took the extreme move of borrowing $250 million from their newly built headquarters pictured, but that seems to be a temporary band-aid on what very well could be a mortal wound.
Old print dinosaurs like the NY Times are the prime example of too much brick and mortar, in a century scaling back on such castles of industry. While everyone else is downsizing and outsourcing. These major institutions of NY continue to retail their skyscrapers for some sort of pride, or for their investors’ confidence. It was the same with the WTC. An obsolete relic. With today’s connectivity, such businesses could be run out of a few smaller, and lower cost buildings, scattered around the country. But NY businesses (and perhaps Chicago too) have this “Us against the world” philosophy (or paranoia). That keeps everything they do all bottled up in those huge buildings, to the bitter end. And that may be coming sooner than they thought.
You know, I’m getting damned tired of people talking about the “Market” like it meant something important. The “Market” is simply the end result of billions of usually very stupid choices made by the ignorant. Nothing more. I’m sick of the “Market” being touted as some mythical energy field that’s all knowing and all encompassing like it was the “Force” or something. It doesn’t “know” shit. We could decide that in the next five or six years that we were going to rebuild the transportation system in this country into a total electric car system, and we could do it. There’s NO doubt it could be done. All we would have do is actually DECIDE that we were going to accomplish that as a goal, and proceed to do it. WE DECIDE. Not some mystical, mumbo-jumbo juju voodoo hoodoo thing-a-ma-bob. So, do you fuckers have Free Will, or are the Market Ghods angry? Are you Men or automatons?
I’d rather have the nightly news broadcasts and the radio news guys get their news is some way other than pick up the Times and read what’s on it on the air.
An editorial board slanting is nothing new ore even bad. It’s when that slant affects the choice and slant of so-called “new” stories that it’s a problem. That slant has been apparent in the NYT for decades.
When it folds, that will be a good thing as the lefties will have a harder time pushing their agenda – they will no longer have a single point of propaganda dissemination.
The Tribune would be a better deal.
A newspaper is simply one means of delivering news content. But there is more.
Ten or twenty years ago I would have said:
The difference between print and broadcast is often the depth and length of stories–and usually the quality. When the TV news covers something at 6 or 11 it is often a 30 second version of the basic facts. Then its on to the “Wednesday’s Child” segment featuring the cute kid of the week. The longer version of the same story that appears in the next day’s paper usually has a much stronger and more lasting impact.
Today there is the Internet–which is bringing far more readers around the world to newspapers’ content but in an unprofitable way–and many cable news outlets which sometimes offer long-form in-depth coverage and analysis which traditional broadcast media outlets–CBS’ 60 minutes aside–would never have the resources or viewers’ attention span to cover. The problem is that these same cable news outfits often give undue attention to a story because it is “breaking” than it really deserves. A helicopter following a car chase that will never be mentioned again after its conclusion is an obvious example.
Print media is very, very expensive to produce and distribute. My newspaper has a circulation of over 9,000 and about 20,000 readers. It costs about $2,000 per issue just to print and distribute. My website has every issue we have ever produced available–so it has all the same content. It costs me about $100 per year.
Here is the problem.
All of the past competition newspapers have historically faced and weather offered arguably lower quality content. Radio, TV & early cable news outlets by their nature offered less time per story and thus lower quality for the end user who wanted all the facts. You can print as many pages in a paper as budget and content allow. You can’t add more minutes into an hour. So the newspapers stayed strong and profitable.
The Internet is completely different. It has all the advantages of print publications (and now even their content) and is portable, usually free and allows for random access to any article rather than having to leaf through a paper or wait through a radio or TV program. It’s an increasingly ADHD consumer’s dream.
So the risk for us all is that if all of the papers go down, who will have the money to pay for the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the future? Who will have the resources to pay a reporter or team of reporters to study and investigate the Walter Reed scandal? That story was around since 2004 but never hit traction until a series of front page stories were printed in the Washington Post after an expensive years-long investigation by their permanent investigations unit–ironically started by Bob Woodward who has the luxury of being able to stay on at the Post for $1 per year.
I’m not arguing that we bail out the industry or that dinosaurs should be kept on life support in perpetutity. I do think that someone will figure this whole mess out and find away to allow the high quality content that some of the big papers have produced to survive in this new age–and help protect democracy in the process.
If there is any outfit that has shown the creativity, intelligence and innovative skills to reform the New York Times–and show the rest of us in the industry the way, it might well be Google.
It certainly won’t be “Wednesday’s Child.”
As for the arguments of the editorial slants of various media outlets, it is nothing new. People on the right see Fox News as “mainstream” and hate the New York Times and MSNBC. People on the left see the inverse. Good. Our diversity makes us stronger. That’s what the first amendment is all about. It’s all about equal access to the system. If Matt Drudge can start the most influential news website in the world single-handedly while sitting in his pajamas in his living room with no advertising then so can you.
#23 – Lyin’ Mike
>>I’d rather have the nightly news broadcasts
>>and the radio news guys get their news is
>>some way other than pick up the Times and
>>read what’s on it on the air.
Well, so would I. But how many nightly new and radio guys actually do ANYTHING other than read a 15- or 30-second synopsis of something written somewhere else?
And if they’re going to do that, better that they get it from the Times than from some lackluster (or tainted) source.
It’s not for nothing that there are no Woodwards or Bernsteins at WND, JWR, or Faux Spews. They can’t be bothered with investigative reporting; they just take stuff off the wire services, twist it to reflect their viewpoint for dissemination.
#24 – SnotPoop
>> It’s when that slant affects the choice and
>>slant of so-called “new” stories that it’s a
>>problem.
Aw, would you let it go, SnotPoop? We all know that the Times got sucked in by discredited journalist Judith Miller into supporting Dumbya’s bullshit “intelligence” that formed the foundation for his trophy war in Iraq.
Don’t cast them in the role of right-wing shills just because of that. They apologized for the mistake.
#27, well WND has been running a series that shows Obama’s book was written by Ayers. Then again just like last time with Lewinsky they’ll probably give the Pulitzer to a mainstream reporter who was late to the story.
#29 – Lyin’ Mike
>>well WND has been running a series that shows
>>Obama’s book was written by Ayers.
Hoo boy. If I read it in WND, I’m sure it must be true. Who do they have working on that breaking story, Jerome Corsi? Or did he make such an ass of himself over that “born in Kenya” nonsense that they put another one of their eager cub reporters on the story?
I’m going to have to re-evaluate you, Lyin’ Mike. I thought you read the truth and just lied about it, but if you’re a WND buff, maybe you’re just reading lies and parroting them verbatim. In that case, you may be simply non guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Hmm.
If the deal goes through, you may see a “Beta” below the NYT logo.
I didn’t know Corsi started the born in Kenya stuff. I figured it was his grandmother when she said she was there for his birth in Kenya.
No, Jack Cashill is behind the book story.
You can see in Obama’s book that he lied about the contents of Jeremiah Wright’s speech, The Audacity of Hope. Either that or the transcript Wright made available has been sanitized.
The additional made-up passages are very similar in style to passages in Ayers’ book.
One made up passage:
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”
The parallel sequence, usually a triple parallel, often coming at the end of a sentence, with the absence of a joining conjunction – an “and,” “or,” or “but.”- there are scores of such examples throughout Ayers’ 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,”
“He inhabited an anarchic solitude – disconnected, smart, obsessive.”
“… trees are shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, shorelines rearranged.”
“The desire to let go, the desire to escape, the desire to give oneself up to a God that could somehow put a floor on despair.”
“… memories that we didn’t need to feel shamed about, memories more accessible than those of ancient Egypt, memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”
“everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.”
# 31 Comacho for President said, “If the deal goes through, you may see a “Beta” below the NYT logo.”
Based on quality & reliability, it’ll say Alpha.