Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism

Janice Min, the editor who created Us Weekly and reinvented The Hollywood Reporter, said The Times’s broadening content mix posed a formidable obstacle for other digital subscription businesses.

“Because we’re talking about the publishing business, it’s all still kind of sad, but in this parallel universe people talk about The New York Times in the way people in Hollywood talk about Netflix,” Ms. Min said. “It’s the tail that wags the dog, and it’s also the dog.”

The rise of The Times from wounded giant to reigning colossus has been as breathtaking as that of any start-up. As recently as 2014, print advertising was collapsing and the idea that subscribers would pay enough to support the company’s expensive global news gathering seemed like a pipe dream.

“We sold off every bit of the company we could sell off to hold our journalism investment as flat as humanly possible,” Mr. Sulzberger, who became publisher in 2018, told me in an interview last week. “All the smart people in media thought it was crazy, all our shareholders thought it was financially irresponsible.”

Just a few years later, amid a deepening crisis in American journalism, and a sustained attack from the president of the United States, Times stock has rebounded to nearly triple what it was in 2014 and the newsroom has added 400 employees. The starting salary for most reporters is $104,600.

The paper is now quietly shopping for dominance in an adjacent industry: audio. The Times is in exclusive talks to acquire Serial Productions, the breakthrough podcast studio that has attracted more than 300 million downloads.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/media/ben-smith-journalism-news-publishers-local.html