Business News You Didn’t Read Here
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE
THE universe covered by The New York Times is vast, spiraling to the ends of the known worlds of politics, business, culture, sports, science, entertainment and more.
Yet at the very center of it all lies a tiny black hole: the largely uncovered subject of The Times’s plan to start charging for access to its Web site.
Although The Times hasn’t given the topic much ink, its competitors have gone after the story with gusto. In late January, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that The Times would charge readers less than $20 a month for full access. A few days later, The Wall Street Journal checked in with a piece describing Times plans for multiple digital subscription packages.
Next, Bloomberg said The Times “has been working to fix about 200 glitches in the technology for charging online readers” and had already repaired 500 other technical problems discovered during tests. As in the Journal story, the information was attributed to an unnamed “person familiar with the matter.”
Just last week, Bloomberg, the British newspaper The Guardian and others covered comments about plans for the pay model that Arthur Sulzberger, the Times chairman and publisher, made on Wednesday.
All very interesting, and you didn’t read it in The Times.
When it comes to news about other media organizations, The Times is not so reticent. In fact, The Times is a great read for people like me who are interested in the latest developments in other media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable, the Internet and all the rest.
Focusing on newspaper companies, to illustrate my point, The Times has published multiple stories in the past year on the introduction of an Internet paywall by Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London. It also covered in-depth the seamy controversy engulfing another Murdoch property in Britain, News of the World, as it contended with charges of unlawfully hacking into celebrities’ cellphone messages.
On this side of the Atlantic, The Times gave ink to Mr. Murdoch’s big U.S. newspaper holding, The Wall Street Journal, as it started a Greater New York section to compete with The Times. And, yes, beyond Rupert’s world, The Times energetically covered problems at the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times — among other pieces on newspapers here and abroad.
Of The Times’s own pay model for its Web site, though, all that has trickled into print is an initial story 14 months ago announcing that the plan would be carried out in a year, plus occasional subsequent references to the looming event. No significant story has been published — at least not as of my Friday evening deadline for this column.
Yet the introduction of the pay model is major news for The Times, for the rest of the newspaper industry, and for Times customers and readers, some of whom have asked me why there hasn’t been coverage. Hence I think there’s a journalistic imperative for The Times to cover it energetically.
John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst, said: “People call me and ask me what I think about The Times’s new plan. I say, ‘Do you know what it is?’ ”
The stakes for The Times, which like other newspaper companies has seen major declines in print advertising revenues, are enormous. I asked Mr. Morton to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the strategic importance of the pending pay model to the future of the organization.
“For the future of The Times,” he replied, “I would say it is somewhere around 10, if not higher.”
With so much riding on this, readers and others might be forgiven for wondering why The Times hasn’t covered the subject with its usual aggressiveness. I asked Bruce Headlam, The Times’s media editor, and here is his response:
“We haven’t been writing much about the proposed Times paywall because, frankly, there hasn’t been much to report. We still don’t know exactly when the paywall is going up, how much it will cost readers or how many free hits readers will get before hitting the wall. Those are the critical questions we want answered — and believe me, we have asked.”
He added that The Times has been working on “more than one story about the paper’s plans” but felt that “because of the high bar for stories about The Times, we needed to break some news in order to justify putting any story in the paper.” He also noted the risk of appearing “self-promotional” in publishing a story.
From my own experience as an editor and publisher, it is awkward and difficult to cover your own news organization. That’s because the goals of a journalist covering the story and the goals of the company — the reporter’s employer — may be seriously in conflict. To permit honest, independent coverage, the company must refrain from exerting its business interest. Even when it does refrain, there’s no way to ensure that a skeptical audience will believe it has done so. So the risk of looking “self-promotional” is real.
All that said, senior journalists and educators I talked to about this believe, as I do, that The Times has no choice but to cover itself on high-profile issues like this.
“I think good newspapers such as The Times should cover themselves,” said Michael Waller, formerly top editor at The Hartford Courant and The Kansas City Star, where I worked under him, as well as publisher of The Courant and The Baltimore Sun. “The Times coverage could be part of a full-time media beat. In the Times case, it may even be worth a full-time beat.”
Kelly McBride, senior faculty member for ethics at the Poynter Institute, noted that in the past The Times has done a good job covering itself in times of great journalistic stress, citing the scandal surrounding the reporter Jayson Blair in 2003. In this case, though, there’s no newsroom scandal, just a sensitive business strategy story. Ms. McBride suggests at least two ways The Times could have ensured strong coverage of the pay model.
One, the company could have hired an outsider to cover the story on a contract, to be edited by someone outside the primary editing system. That’s an approach that resembles the system for the public editor, whose job is to report on The Times’s journalism, not its business development.
Another approach, she suggested, would be to “overcommunicate your goals for the coverage. You tell everybody in the company, ‘We want you to cover us as if you didn’t work for us,’ and you tell your audience that, too, and hope your words will become reality.”
Of these approaches, this last one seems most workable to me. In a way that’s visible internally and externally, The Times should commit the media team to covering The Times itself more aggressively. This would yield stories that readers want to read and blunt criticism that, when it comes to covering itself, The Times has a blind spot.
Yet at the very center of it all lies a tiny black hole: the largely uncovered subject of The Times’s plan to start charging for access to its Web site.
Although The Times hasn’t given the topic much ink, its competitors have gone after the story with gusto. In late January, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that The Times would charge readers less than $20 a month for full access. A few days later, The Wall Street Journal checked in with a piece describing Times plans for multiple digital subscription packages.
Next, Bloomberg said The Times “has been working to fix about 200 glitches in the technology for charging online readers” and had already repaired 500 other technical problems discovered during tests. As in the Journal story, the information was attributed to an unnamed “person familiar with the matter.”
Just last week, Bloomberg, the British newspaper The Guardian and others covered comments about plans for the pay model that Arthur Sulzberger, the Times chairman and publisher, made on Wednesday.
All very interesting, and you didn’t read it in The Times.
When it comes to news about other media organizations, The Times is not so reticent. In fact, The Times is a great read for people like me who are interested in the latest developments in other media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable, the Internet and all the rest.
Focusing on newspaper companies, to illustrate my point, The Times has published multiple stories in the past year on the introduction of an Internet paywall by Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London. It also covered in-depth the seamy controversy engulfing another Murdoch property in Britain, News of the World, as it contended with charges of unlawfully hacking into celebrities’ cellphone messages.
On this side of the Atlantic, The Times gave ink to Mr. Murdoch’s big U.S. newspaper holding, The Wall Street Journal, as it started a Greater New York section to compete with The Times. And, yes, beyond Rupert’s world, The Times energetically covered problems at the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times — among other pieces on newspapers here and abroad.
Of The Times’s own pay model for its Web site, though, all that has trickled into print is an initial story 14 months ago announcing that the plan would be carried out in a year, plus occasional subsequent references to the looming event. No significant story has been published — at least not as of my Friday evening deadline for this column.
Yet the introduction of the pay model is major news for The Times, for the rest of the newspaper industry, and for Times customers and readers, some of whom have asked me why there hasn’t been coverage. Hence I think there’s a journalistic imperative for The Times to cover it energetically.
John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst, said: “People call me and ask me what I think about The Times’s new plan. I say, ‘Do you know what it is?’ ”
The stakes for The Times, which like other newspaper companies has seen major declines in print advertising revenues, are enormous. I asked Mr. Morton to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, the strategic importance of the pending pay model to the future of the organization.
“For the future of The Times,” he replied, “I would say it is somewhere around 10, if not higher.”
With so much riding on this, readers and others might be forgiven for wondering why The Times hasn’t covered the subject with its usual aggressiveness. I asked Bruce Headlam, The Times’s media editor, and here is his response:
“We haven’t been writing much about the proposed Times paywall because, frankly, there hasn’t been much to report. We still don’t know exactly when the paywall is going up, how much it will cost readers or how many free hits readers will get before hitting the wall. Those are the critical questions we want answered — and believe me, we have asked.”
He added that The Times has been working on “more than one story about the paper’s plans” but felt that “because of the high bar for stories about The Times, we needed to break some news in order to justify putting any story in the paper.” He also noted the risk of appearing “self-promotional” in publishing a story.
From my own experience as an editor and publisher, it is awkward and difficult to cover your own news organization. That’s because the goals of a journalist covering the story and the goals of the company — the reporter’s employer — may be seriously in conflict. To permit honest, independent coverage, the company must refrain from exerting its business interest. Even when it does refrain, there’s no way to ensure that a skeptical audience will believe it has done so. So the risk of looking “self-promotional” is real.
All that said, senior journalists and educators I talked to about this believe, as I do, that The Times has no choice but to cover itself on high-profile issues like this.
“I think good newspapers such as The Times should cover themselves,” said Michael Waller, formerly top editor at The Hartford Courant and The Kansas City Star, where I worked under him, as well as publisher of The Courant and The Baltimore Sun. “The Times coverage could be part of a full-time media beat. In the Times case, it may even be worth a full-time beat.”
Kelly McBride, senior faculty member for ethics at the Poynter Institute, noted that in the past The Times has done a good job covering itself in times of great journalistic stress, citing the scandal surrounding the reporter Jayson Blair in 2003. In this case, though, there’s no newsroom scandal, just a sensitive business strategy story. Ms. McBride suggests at least two ways The Times could have ensured strong coverage of the pay model.
One, the company could have hired an outsider to cover the story on a contract, to be edited by someone outside the primary editing system. That’s an approach that resembles the system for the public editor, whose job is to report on The Times’s journalism, not its business development.
Another approach, she suggested, would be to “overcommunicate your goals for the coverage. You tell everybody in the company, ‘We want you to cover us as if you didn’t work for us,’ and you tell your audience that, too, and hope your words will become reality.”
Of these approaches, this last one seems most workable to me. In a way that’s visible internally and externally, The Times should commit the media team to covering The Times itself more aggressively. This would yield stories that readers want to read and blunt criticism that, when it comes to covering itself, The Times has a blind spot.
