Arthur Sulberger Say NYT Will End Print…. What Now?

how long?

Yesterday, in London at the WAN-IFRA conference, New York Times Chairman and CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that

“We will stop printing The New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD.”

This is, of course, both enviable and inevitable.

Inevitable because the Times, like other papers, can not keep on hemorrhaging money forever. And the physical process of printing the paper, cutting own the trees, applying the ink to the paper, delivering the physical good represents 85% of the total cost of running the paper.

Stop the presses!

The question, of course, is whether an online only edition of the paper can generate enough revenue to sustain the remaining 15% that is the editorial staff.

No one really knows.

I spent two years at President of New York Times TV.  My offices were at the Hipadrome building on Sixth Avenue. I shared a floor with Martin Nisenholtz, who was just starting the online edition of The New York Times.

These were both fledgling operations, removed from the paper’s main headquarters and far from the newsroom.

In all honesty, in those days, I would have put my bet on taking The New York Times into television before any kind of online play.

We’re talking 1996.

Television still paid big money and at our height NY Times TV was producing a lot of television for cable – so much so that we had to move our offices downtown where we could accommodate more than 30 edit suites running full-time.  We were generating millions in revenues, we were producing for Nat Geo, LTC, Discovery, Showtime an lots more. We got so good that Joe Lelyveld, the Managing Editor of the paper (who proudly told me he did not own a TV set) referred to us as Pariah Pictures.  They didn’t think a newspaper should be in the cable TV business.

But, as my ex-wife used to so charmingly tell me ‘you bet wrong’.

Indeed, the future was to be online, albeit in a strange and non-income producing way.

(This might explain a lot of our current financial problems).

But here is the lesson I learned from my two years at The Times, and I pass it on to Arthur free of charge.

All the time we were at The Times we were always trying to sell ‘NY Times on TV’ shows.

No one wanted them.

No one was interested.

And they tried a lot – ‘newsroom’, ‘reporters’ even ‘crossword puzzle’. Nothing.

We got one small shot with Science Times at TLC. It didn’t rate.

But that didn’t mean that NY Times TV didn’t make money. On the contrary….

So now the NY Times of the future, shorn of the paper has to address the issue of how to make money.

Maybe it isn’t about ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ anymore – no more than the successful NY Times Television was about what was in the paper.

Many people read a newspaper not just for the news or the journalism, but also to see what movies are playing, what’s on sale at the Department store, what the local supermarket has a special on. It’s not news. It’s information.

Craig Newmark was a genius for stripping out one aspect of this ancilliary non-journalism aspect of papers – the classifieds. But there are lots of others.

The NY Times is a massive information gathering and processing resource.

But maybe, if its going to shift into the online world, it would do well to not be quite so fixated on news and journalism and more on ‘information.

Which is what it seems people want.

And there, as Google, perhaps the world’s primary purveyor of all information has discovered, there’s a fortune to be had.

Even better than producing reality shows for Discovery.