There's been a lively discussion this past week in the blogosphere over the plight of The New York Times. The genesis of it was a piece Michael Hirschorn tossed off in January's The Atlantic magazine positing, with thin evidence, that the Times was facing imminent demise and would have to radically cut everything from editorial to home delivery. On Wednesday, Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget put some flesh on Hirschorn with a long post disguised as an analyst report arguing that the Times needed to cut 40% from overhead, boost delivery fees and charge for online to survive. That elicited a scathing reaction from Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com, who took some whacks at Blodget's arguments (he dismissed Hirschorn out of hand), arguing that edit needed to be saved, that you can't charge for commodity news and that the Times' strategy of becoming a national paper was the right one.
The answer may lurk somewhere in the middle.
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The Times will undoubtedly have to cut and get more productive. Home delivery will probably have to get pricier. Online will have to be more effectively monetized, either through subscriptions or advertising. And the company may have to continue to raise money to make debt payments, as it did with the Carlos Slim stake and the approaching sale-leaseback deal on its headquarters building with W.P. Carey & Co. LLC, as reported by the Times on Friday. But Salmon's ultimate answer sounds about right: Some creative way to take the Times private, either through a nonprofit arrangement or a buyout, and remove it from the vagaries of the public market. The danger there, of course, is that insulated from market realities, the paper becomes even more ingrown and self-referential than it is today. And, as with everything about the Times, who knows how this take-private fits into the dynamics and desires of the Sulzberger family.
All this back and forth is worth taking a look at for anyone wondering what's going to happen to newspapers in the U.S. And here's another reading assignment: Our own Chris Nolter in the new Jan. 26 issue of The Deal has written a long and thoughtful piece about the plight of the papers. He runs through many of the strategies newspapers have tried, or are trying, to survive this recession and the coming of the Internet. He doesn't offer a fuzzy blanket of hope: Given the problems -- advertising collapsing, classified gone, high debt costs with scarce financing, high costs of delivery, a readership that no longer seems to care as much -- Nolter suggests that some cities will find themselves without traditional dailies. On the hopeful side, however, is that many papers still have robust brands, which, at the end of the day, is their greatest asset (which is why you have to be very careful with the Times' edit operation). But newsrooms -- the Times included -- and distribution systems are probably in for a radical rethinking of what they do and how they do it.
After reading all this stuff, you do get a sense of how difficult these questions are. There are no panaceas. The business has to change. But declaring the need for creative destruction, a la Hirschorn or Blodget, is easy from the confines of The Atlantic or Silicon Alley Insider. It's a lot tougher from Times Square. - Robert Teitelman
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Robert Teitelman is the editor in chief of The Deal.
