Uploading ‘All The News That’s Fit To Print’

The New York Times receives tens of millions of visitors every month. Its traffic on the web surpassed the paper’s circulation rate some time ago, and it’s continuing to grow. The company is struggling to maintain a healthy profit (what investors want), but it also understands the need to shed any fears about moving into a web-only future, where a very lucrative advertising model still has yet to be formulated. Speculation is that The New York Timesmakes only a few million dollars from the online revenue it generates each year, which is still far less than it’s office for print adverts brings in.

As more advertisers move from print and television to the web, however, that’ll change, so publisher of The New York Times says. In an interview published in Haaretz, and blogged about on Silicon Valley Watcher, Arthur Sulzberger claimed it his duty to bring the Times onto the Internet and maintain profit margins. He stated: “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years. And you know what? I don’t care, either.”

The Times’ publisher considered the company on a journey from paper-only to online-only. At its current stage it’s somewhere in the middle.

There are many, many upsides to the move The New York Times wishes to make. Multimedia is very comfortably consumed on the web, what with 70%-or-more broadband saturation in many countries around the world. The New York Times itself places video, slideshows, and podcasts online that go unheard and unseen by readers only of the tangible daily. But there are several downsides to the paper version being cut out of the picture.

Currently, I myself subscribe to a daily (minus Sundays), The Wall Street Journal. There’s something to the idea of flipping through something in your hands, whereas when it’s on the screen, a disconnect is felt. A quickly-read digest is hardly necessary to consume in paper form, but lengthy stories that rest in your hands are far more pleasant off screen. Furthermore, something that can be handled in a myriad of different ways, be tossed about and even forgotten without care is attractive for many people. Until the day electronic paper can truly take of its predecessor, we’ll continue to use our beloved tabulae traditionale.

Also, there is a right price for everything. The marketers at The New York Times have insisted on forgoing a discounted annual rate for a shadier deal offering several months of delivery at a lower rate, after which the standard rate would kick in. They fail to mention the standard rate, too. The reason The Wall Street Journal appealed to me is not its right-leaning editorial board. In fact, as an egalitarian, I frequently disagree with what the heads of the paper have to say about current events. Instead, it had to do with the $99 rate for a year of home delivery. If the New York Times instituted a flat annual fee at an enticing price, they would surely bring on more subscribers.

But even if newspapers continue to reside on the modern papyrus of today, the statement made by Sulzberger portends a day when The New York Times in print really does exist no longer. And the company could very well thrive without added cost and mess of the presses. But it may not hold folks’ interest the way it has over the many decades it has been turning out “All the news that’s fit to print”, in print.

I enjoy very much the online-only features and the breaking news that can be read on The New York Times website. But I enjoy equally “the real thing” as well.