The soon-to-be-working for the Center for American Progress Matt Yglesias writes:
The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but
he observes that from a business perspective it’s primarily a fashion
and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the
side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYTAnd, of course, I would add that the broader logic of the internet
is toward disaggregation of content — the fact that newspapers cover
such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing
and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads
probably won’t be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere. On the
other hand, there may be a corrupting impact of some of this
cross-subsidization — I can’t help but suspect that the importance of
real estate advertising to papers may have distorted their coverage of
the housing bubble on the way up.
On the bubble: Why would advertising even have to distort the coverage? Newspapers are a small group telling a big group what is information important, or at least what is readily available. Why wouldn’t this in itself have negative consequences for an assumption of a rational market based on individuals making individual decisions based on all information.
RE: How the Times makes money – I believe About.com has the highest profit margin of any of operating divisions of NYT Co. Given some of the company’s other online operations, I wonder how long it will be before someone suggests that NYT Co. is a .com company with a print division on the side. (It’ll be a ridiculous thing to say with a straight face even 10 years from now, but someone might.)
So, if the downmarket section of the newspaper subsidizes the investigative journalism and political coverage, does that mean that after disaggregation and unbundling we can look forward to a steep decline in detailed investigative reporting?
Is it disaggregation or dispersion? I see more granularity in the subject matter, but not necessarily less bundling of disparate subject matter.
My understanding of the Times business model is not that the magazine pays for the NYT, but the Lakeland Ledger and all the other local papers they own pay for the NYT, which on its own breaks even at best. This may have changed with the Internet.
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