Posts tagged New York Times

New York Times Give Red Sox the Boo

Via the New York Times:

The New York Times has sold its remaining stake in the Fenway Sports Group, the company that owns the Boston Red Sox, the latest in a continuing effort to shed assets unrelated to the company’s flagship newspaper…

…In 2002, The Times paid $75 million for a 17.75 percent stake in Fenway. But the 2008 recession and the steady decline of print advertising revenue at newspapers like The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, has prompted the company to shed its nonessential assets.

As a Boston fan who knows the Red Sox suck, nonessential? Harsh.

Awful Event: President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin Before the Banner headline front page news was a bit understated. Image: New York Times front page from April 15, 1865. Via the NYT’s Facebook Timeline.

Awful Event: President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin

Before the Banner headline front page news was a bit understated.

Image: New York Times front page from April 15, 1865. Via the NYT’s Facebook Timeline.

New York Times Top Brass Trolled by Former Editor Armed with Embarrassing Anecdote

On Friday afternoon, prompted by a survey in which journalism was ranked among the worst jobs in the country, New York Times media reporter David Carr asked a question: How do America’s journalists feel about their jobs? Carr opened the question up to commenters, who cut a pretty wide swath of opinions. One commenter, however, stood out above the rest, giving less an answer than a hilariously trolling story about a particularly high-rankingTimesman’s ascent.

observer.com

One hundred years ago today the Titanic hit an iceberg south of Newfoundland. This is tomorrow’s New York Times. Bonus: Images of the Titanic wreck made by stitching together hundreds of optical and sonar images collected by robots via Scientific American, Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute, and National Geographic.

One hundred years ago today the Titanic hit an iceberg south of Newfoundland. This is tomorrow’s New York Times.

Bonus: Images of the Titanic wreck made by stitching together hundreds of optical and sonar images collected by robots via Scientific American, Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute, and National Geographic.

To accompany an article on hyperaddictive stupid games, the New York Times creates a hyperaddictive stupid game.

Click through to play.

As you can see, I tried to destroy the site’s navigation.

When I first got here and was watching the page one meeting, I’d watch them decide what were going to be the six most important stories in the western world for the following day’s paper. Meanwhile the web’s above their heads, where all stories are becoming interchangeable. I thought, ‘Oh, this is so silly to blow a whistle and say, “Stop! These are the stories worth your attention.’”

But now that I’m bathed in information every single day and stuff is wooshing by me, I kind of love the full-stop arrangement of stories on The New York Times. A lot of times I wake up and think about the day that’s just passed and wonder, ‘What was that? What happened?’ A lot of stuff, and I can’t really tell which part of it was important.
David Carr (via soupsoup)

soupsoup

While The New York Times, in print and online, continues to be a marvel of American journalism, the economics of the business are challenging, and have been for some time. Despite the success of the pay model, and the hard work of Guild members and excluded managers alike, New York Times Media Group revenues declined 22 percent during the term of your last contract, from 2003 to 2011.

We wish this weren’t true, but it is. No business can face a decline of this magnitude without taking steps to bring its costs into line with the smaller revenues. Over the last few years, we’ve reduced staff, tightly controlled nonpayroll expenses and eliminated some unprofitable operations, and froze defined pension plans for non-union employees. The Guild did participate with us when we sought a temporary 5 percent payroll reduction in 2009 as part of this effort, and we deeply appreciate it.

Nevertheless, we have to do more. To ignore it would be to put The Times itself, and all of our jobs, at risk. And the most important thing we can do is to eliminate the expense, risk and volatility of the defined-benefit pension plans many of our employees have enjoyed over the years. In doing this, we are acting no differently than most other employers in America — as The Times itself reported a few weeks ago, only 14 percent of employees throughout the country still have defined-benefit pension plans. They are great for employees, but they are, sadly, unaffordable.

Terry Hayes, Senior Vice President Operations and Labor, New York Times, in a memo to staff explaining the paper’s position on labor negotiations with the Newspaper Guild of New York.

The news: the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents many New York Times newsroom employees, and the Times have been negotiating a new contract after the previous one expired. The Times, which saw a net loss of $39.7 million in 2011 would like to reduce future pension obligations.

The Guild, which also represents 3,000 media employees at New York area news organizations as diverse as Thompson Reuters, the Nation, El Diario and Jewish Forward, calls the Times’ new offer “slightly less offensive” than previous proposals.

Hayes’ memo via Jim Romenesko.

Bypassing the NYT Paywall, Redux Edition

Yesterday I reblogged a Reuters post that reports that The New York Times will limit free articles to 10 per month. After the repost I linked to a short video we created a while ago about getting around the paywall. To make sixty seconds short, it shows that you just need to delete everything after the “?” mark in the URL and reload the page to access any article you want.

Here’s some criticism for doing so:

  • Via Morgan Little from the LA Times: Seems a bit off for @the_FJP to be advocating paywall workarounds…
  • Via OnTheChangGang: Don’t be a jerk, if you really want to support journalism and journalists pay to gain access to their hard work and efforts. C’mon use your mind grapes where do people think the money for salaries and investigative stories come from?
  • Via SammyStokes: or you know, you could pay for a subscription so the world’s most important newspaper doesn’t go under.

I should say that the criticism is more or less valid. I should also say that my language (“FJP: Paywall got you down? Here’s our 60 second tutorial on getting around it.”) doesn’t help.

Here’s what I should have written if I was thinking at the time:

  • The New York Times has about 450,000 digital subscribers. Good for them. I set my parents up with both digital and print editions.
  • The New York Times has about 30 million unique visitors a month. Thirty million, if you do your math, is much larger than 450,000, impressive as that number may be.
  • This simple hack of removing everything after the “?” mark in order to access articles tells us that the New York Times is still focussed on the 99% of traffic that isn’t subscribing, and is trying to figure out how to monetize nytimes.com to make sure that those non-subscribing uniques can still access, share, and distribute content so that they can grow that number.
  • This leak is basically a punt on monetizing the 99% aside from the (considerable) revenue they’re pulling in from advertising and other related businesses.

And so, with that as my backstory to posting a link to a video about how easy it is to get around the NYT paywall, I wrote shorthand about how to do so.

Sometimes when you’re in the weeds you forget the forest for the trees but my link to circumventing the paywall is part of a larger and longer discussion that’s been going on at the FJP about paywalls and how they might work.

The New York Times is very much aware of how leaky their paywall is. It is very much aware that deleting a string from a URL gives anyone access to their content. This is a both a design and business decision that I can’t imagine they’re very much worried about. Otherwise, they’d close this gap.

So, in the meantime, I’ll post again — with the caveat that if you can afford a subscription, purchase a subscription — if you want to view a New York Times article but have bumped up against your monthly allotment, follow the instructions posted here.

If the New York Times wants to shut down this access they can do so quickly and easily. Until then, have at it — Michael

reuters: New York Times Co said on Tuesday it will halve the number of free articles readers can view on its NYTimes.com site. Starting in April visitors to the website will be able to read up to 10 free articles a month, down from 20 free articles previously. The change comes one year after launching the paid digital subscription, which now has 454,000 paid subscribers. The Times, like other U.S. newspaper publishers, has been struggling with sinking advertising sales and dwindling print subscribers and has focused on improving its digital strategy to replace the lost revenue. The company started 2012 without a CEO or a digital boss after former CEO Janet Robinson and former digital head Martin Nisenholtz retired. Read more: New York Times cuts free digital articles by 50 percent FJP: Paywall got you down? Here’s our 60 second tutorial on getting around it. Update: We posted Bypassing the NYT Paywall, Redux Edition to clarify our comment

reuters:

New York Times Co said on Tuesday it will halve the number of free articles readers can view on its NYTimes.com site.

Starting in April visitors to the website will be able to read up to 10 free articles a month, down from 20 free articles previously. The change comes one year after launching the paid digital subscription, which now has 454,000 paid subscribers.

The Times, like other U.S. newspaper publishers, has been struggling with sinking advertising sales and dwindling print subscribers and has focused on improving its digital strategy to replace the lost revenue.

The company started 2012 without a CEO or a digital boss after former CEO Janet Robinson and former digital head Martin Nisenholtz retired.

Read more: New York Times cuts free digital articles by 50 percent

FJP: Paywall got you down? Here’s our 60 second tutorial on getting around it.

Update: We posted Bypassing the NYT Paywall, Redux Edition to clarify our comment

reuters

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journo-geekery:

The Future of The New York Times #sxsw #FutureNYT

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson discusses her vision for the future of The Times in the digital age in a session moderated by Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith. Does Abramson’s leadership at The Times present a blueprint for sustainability for the newspaper industry?

#sxsw #FutureNYT

journo-geekery

An Illustrated Future of the New York Times ImageThink put together this very nice illustration for a talk given by the New York Times’ Jill Abramson at SXSW about the newspaper’s future. Select to embiggen.

An Illustrated Future of the New York Times

ImageThink put together this very nice illustration for a talk given by the New York Times’ Jill Abramson at SXSW about the newspaper’s future.

Select to embiggen.

The New York Times’ Facebook Timeline now goes back to 1851. Shown here is a screenshot from 1912.

The New York Times’ Facebook Timeline now goes back to 1851.

Shown here is a screenshot from 1912.

livelymorgue:

An archival photo from The New York Times shows news pictures being sorted in the newspaper’s photo “morgue,” which houses millions of images. Here they are — several each week — for you to see. Welcome to The Lively Morgue. Photo: The New York Times  

The New York Times has a new tumblr; The Lively Morgue.

livelymorgue

Forbes Blogger Steals $20,000 and 1 Million Pageviews from New York Times by Changing Headline Now how’s that for a grabber? If it got your attention it just demonstrates how important headlines are in online journalism. Sensationalism, link bait, and a little SEO can be worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your organization. The New York Times  got into a bit of a dustup over a piece of its investigative reporting that became a runaway hit only after it appeared Kashmir Hill’s Not-So Private Parts blog on Forbes.  Nick O’Neill writes: They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patterns to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved. The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career. Even those numbers are a bit dated. The Forbes retelling will likely hit 1 million views before Monday morning. And beyond the pageview count, and prestige for the reporters involved, there’s a very real monetary cost associated with sloppy or overly-cautious headline writing. Let’s calculate. A June 2010 report from Econsultancy pegs the average CPM for all news sites at $7 industry-wide. CPM stands for cost per mille and represents the amount of money publishers receive from display advertisements for each thousand pageviews. According to the report, the New York Times brand was receiving 32.5 million monthly viewers and 719 million pageviews in May of 2010. An average CPM of $7 drags down the likely value of display advertisements on the NYT, the website for the paper of record. I tried to dig up some display advertising rates for NYT.com and I found a current rate sheet. That said, but I can’t conceive of anything less helpful. (The Times has a bit of attachment to opaque financial disclosures)  Assuming that the current CPM for the New York Times is $20,  the company forfeited $20,000 in potential advertising revenue to Forbes on the basis of a headline. My guess is that the Times has a much higher CPM than $20. Considering what staff journalists earn these days, a single headline cost The New York Times newsroom the equivalent several months of a reporter’s salary.  And the story no doubt  required the investment hundreds of man hours, and thousands of dollars in wages to. Unfortunately, it’s fair game and nothing will stop it from happening again. The whole episode reminds me of the story from the Steve Jobs autobiography. In the early 1980s Jobs asked Gates and Microsoft to create a version visual interface, BASIC, for Apple’s Macintosh computers. In November of 1983, before Apple was able to ship its Apple IIs with a graphical user interface, Microsoft had already released an early version of Windows for IBM compatible machines, based on the product originally developed for Apple. Jobs was furious at Gates for ripping off the Windows operating system from Apple and summoned him to Cupertino for a brow beating. In a boardroom packed with Apple minions Gates calmly explained to Jobs that both Apple and Microsoft had stolen the idea from Xerox research, which they had been too slow to commercialize themselves. Gates told Jobs, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” The rich neighbor is The New York Times in the news business. Almost every news outlet worth its salt rewrites original New York Times stories and tailors them for a specific audience. Parasitic properties like Gawker and Huffington Post would not exist were it not for the nourishment of a host like the Times. Today both are much larger and more robust organizations that publish plenty of original content. Unfortunately for The New York Times Company, it is still years away from realizing the dollar value of its editorial influence, and its considerable investment in original reporting. In the meantime, expect the break-ins to continue unabated. Image:Flickr

Forbes Blogger Steals $20,000 and 1 Million Pageviews from New York Times by Changing Headline

Now how’s that for a grabber? If it got your attention it just demonstrates how important headlines are in online journalism. Sensationalism, link bait, and a little SEO can be worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your organization.

The New York Times  got into a bit of a dustup over a piece of its investigative reporting that became a runaway hit only after it appeared Kashmir Hill’s Not-So Private Parts blog on Forbes. 

Nick O’Neill writes:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patterns to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved.

The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.

Even those numbers are a bit dated. The Forbes retelling will likely hit 1 million views before Monday morning. And beyond the pageview count, and prestige for the reporters involved, there’s a very real monetary cost associated with sloppy or overly-cautious headline writing. Let’s calculate.

A June 2010 report from Econsultancy pegs the average CPM for all news sites at $7 industry-wide. CPM stands for cost per mille and represents the amount of money publishers receive from display advertisements for each thousand pageviews. According to the report, the New York Times brand was receiving 32.5 million monthly viewers and 719 million pageviews in May of 2010. An average CPM of $7 drags down the likely value of display advertisements on the NYT, the website for the paper of record.

I tried to dig up some display advertising rates for NYT.com and I found a current rate sheet. That said, but I can’t conceive of anything less helpful. (The Times has a bit of attachment to opaque financial disclosures)  Assuming that the current CPM for the New York Times is $20,  the company forfeited $20,000 in potential advertising revenue to Forbes on the basis of a headline. My guess is that the Times has a much higher CPM than $20. Considering what staff journalists earn these days, a single headline cost The New York Times newsroom the equivalent several months of a reporter’s salary.  And the story no doubt  required the investment hundreds of man hours, and thousands of dollars in wages to. Unfortunately, it’s fair game and nothing will stop it from happening again.

The whole episode reminds me of the story from the Steve Jobs autobiography. In the early 1980s Jobs asked Gates and Microsoft to create a version visual interface, BASIC, for Apple’s Macintosh computers. In November of 1983, before Apple was able to ship its Apple IIs with a graphical user interface, Microsoft had already released an early version of Windows for IBM compatible machines, based on the product originally developed for Apple. Jobs was furious at Gates for ripping off the Windows operating system from Apple and summoned him to Cupertino for a brow beating. In a boardroom packed with Apple minions Gates calmly explained to Jobs that both Apple and Microsoft had stolen the idea from Xerox research, which they had been too slow to commercialize themselves. Gates told Jobs, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

The rich neighbor is The New York Times in the news business. Almost every news outlet worth its salt rewrites original New York Times stories and tailors them for a specific audience. Parasitic properties like Gawker and Huffington Post would not exist were it not for the nourishment of a host like the Times. Today both are much larger and more robust organizations that publish plenty of original content.

Unfortunately for The New York Times Company, it is still years away from realizing the dollar value of its editorial influence, and its considerable investment in original reporting. In the meantime, expect the break-ins to continue unabated.

Image:Flickr

nickoneill.com