https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
$259,753,000 per year net income in 2005: https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
That comparison puts it into perspective for me. Until I looked up the comparison, I thought $84M a year profit sounded fantastic.
Really puts into perspective how tumultuous the last 15 years has been for even the biggest newspapers.
Compared to going out of business in a changing landscape, absolutely it's a success. The music industry went through something similar. The book industry (textbooks in particular) are about to go through it also.
I ask only as someone (of many) who deeply resents textbook price gouging.
Textbooks are obviously open to the same digitization and free-access issues as other media, but their sales model fundamentally different because it's one giant principal-agent problem.
In public schools, digitization won't touch textbook profits any time soon because they're bought in bulk, and because multi-year use keeps costs reasonable. Giving out digital copies isn't a major edge if you can get 5-10 years out of a book. As for college students, there's just very little incentive to care about costs. Example: for many of my classes, buying and reselling textbooks, renting them, and getting digital-only access mysteriously converged on the same price - just like you'd predict in a market with no real competition. So the only real question is whether sellers can control piracy or other covert cost reductions like buying international versions and older editions.
So far, they seem to be doing pretty well at it. Altering problems in foreign and new additions doesn't stop everyone, but it deters many students. Mandatory online courseware with in-book CD keys is a masterstroke, since it not only kills piracy but forces students to buy $100 books they might have forgone altogether - no more using library copies if you're hard up for money!
I've only seen two hints of change. One is outreach to agents (i.e. professors) on quality; there are now mix-and-match services that will sell combined chapters from a variety of books, which might someday drive more competition among writers and professor awareness of book choice. The second is the existence of student rebellion in specific majors (i.e. Computer Science) where students are very likely to have digital, pirated, or nonexistent textbooks, to the point where things like "open book exams" are considered outrageous.
That's pretty what we already have actually. The amount of original reporting done on a major news story is far, far lower than the number of newspapers out there.
This study from 2010 is useful:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/the-googlechina-hacking-cas...
Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently.
Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China).
The story being studied had an international dimension which bumped up the number of outlets doing original reporting, as it was impactful to both the USA and China. Most stories that are only relevant to one country would have far fewer.
This is one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is shrinking - the internet makes it clear for the first time how little original reporting there really is, and how much duplication of that little original reporting goes on.
As for picking teams, gaslighting etc ... US media is experiencing a surge in profits right now, and as far as I can tell the reason is that they've more or less openly abandoned any pretence of political neutrality. They've become anti-Trump cheerleaders that are more in the business of helping their readers feel superior than in the business of real news. It's hard to blame them because this appears to be a more profitable business to be in than trying to be neutral and it's caused a surge in trust amongst democrats only. But of course it makes them vulnerable, even in a country with the first amendment. The USA doesn't have a president who hates the media for no reason.
There's an enormous federal investigation into the political operatives of only one party. The counts of corruption are far higher for one party.
When news comes out about indictments and criminal trials of those in only one party, it's not because the media outlet has abandoned neutrality.
This is not to say I don't understand why they're infuriated with Trump (I likely would be too), or that I somehow think they're spreading fake news, or anything like that. But the thing is, some outlets (like CNN, but it's not the only one) do at least appear to have become less neutral and more hostile to Trump (even if justifiably so). It's by no means anything close to all of them, but the effect unfortunately does seem apparent for some of them, and it does almost seem like they don't really notice or mind it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/08/08/donald-trump-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/219824/democrats-confidence-mas...
Do you really need evidence US media is anti-Trump? Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him? From what I recall they all went for Hillary, there was even one paper (the USA Today?) that had never endorsed a candidate before and they went for Hillary.
Based on what criteria?
==Do you really need evidence US media is anti-Trump? Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him?==
Is the second part actually evidence of the first part or does it simply reinforce your prior belief? Can you name any candidate in history who was gifted more free screen-time or print-space by US media?
As for the latter paragraph, are you implying news outlets simply sell screen-time and print-space? How can the media "gift" coverage? Their job is to report what's happening and things said and done by a presidential candidate is clearly news. And yes of course the abundance of newspapers openly stating they wanted his opponent to win is evidence of being anti-Trump: that's basic logic.
Please expand on this statement. From my perspective, I see someone who supports tariffs, closed borders, increased debt, increased spending, handouts for specific industries ("picking winners and losers"), vilification of law enforcement, and more. These all go directly against traditionally "conservative" principles.
==are you implying news outlets simply sell screen-time and print-space==
How do you think the media makes money as a business? They are called advertisements, typically one must pay for them. In Trump's case, they covered him non-stop free of charge, essentially gifting him free advertising.
==And yes of course the abundance of newspapers openly stating they wanted his opponent to win is evidence of being anti-Trump==
Endorsements are done by editorial boards, which are distinct from journalists. The TV journalists gave Trump air time by not only showing all of his rallies, but showing the empty podium before the rallies. Meanwhile the rallies of Hillary Clinton were not covered in the same breathless way. The Washington Post wrote an entire article about it and estimated it at $2 billion[1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/03/1...
> Can you name any large, well known newspapers that endorsed him?
No! You are not allowed to turn the tables on me. You are the one that should show that "the Media" is anti-Trump, I shouldn't have to prove that it isn't.
Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, five gave no endorsement, three endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The rest directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.
This is obviously a different question than "is the media conservative or liberal?", "is the non-editorial coverage at major news organizations generally anti-Trump?", or "are news organizations employing a partisan agenda in their decisions about how to cover Trump?
The first one of those questions is relatively easy to answer: according to an Indiana University survey of 1080 journalists in broadly 'traditional' roles, 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats. The number identifying as Republicans has also been falling faster than the number identifying as Democrats in equivalent prior surveys.
The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.
Intuitively, I would propose that cable television leans left with one obvious exception, while local news and television stations are much more scattered - and less dependent on the views of their journalists, since they often have purchased content and partisan owners like Sinclair.
Factually, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard finds that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, news coverage of Trump was 80% negative. They find that CNN and NBC were most negative, while even Fox was 52% negative.
The third is so open-ended that I can't imagine discussing it without agreeing on a bunch of specific standards for evidence and discussion, because it requires deciding where objective coverage of badness stops and partisanship starts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-ame...
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...
> 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats
The problem with these kind of stats is that they never reveal what kind of journalists we are talking about. It's irrelevant (to the question of bias in media) whether journalists reviewing books and movies likes Republicans or Democrats. Only journalists reporting on political and economical topics biases matters.
The negative reporting from the 100 first days I believe is at least partially because there were a lot of turmoil that were hard to spin in a positive light. The Russia collusion investigation, Muslim travel ban, repeal of Obamacare and so on. The reporting about the tax cuts have probably been more positive.
But I don't doubt that most journalists dislike Trump and that probably affects their reporting about him. Given his antics which involves calling them all liars and banning journalists from newspapers he particularly hates, I don't find that strange at all. Given that Trump is an "anti-Media" president I think the reporting about him has been very fair.
If you now think I'm moving the goal post, let me define "anti-$President." If you can show that media's reporting about Trump is just as slanted as Fox News' reporting was about Obama, then I would concede that media is anti-Trump.
Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, two gave no endorsement, two endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The other 45 directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.
This is obviously a different question than "is the media conservative or liberal?", "is the non-editorial coverage at major news organizations generally anti-Trump?", or "are news organizations employing a partisan agenda in their decisions about how to cover Trump?
The first one of those questions is relatively easy to answer: according to an Indiana University survey of 1080 journalists in broadly 'traditional' roles, 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats. The number identifying as Republicans has also been falling faster than the number identifying as Democrats in equivalent prior surveys.
The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.
Intuitively, I would propose that cable television leans left with one obvious exception, while local news and television stations are much more scattered - and less dependent on the views of their journalists, since they often have purchased content and partisan owners like Sinclair.
Factually, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard finds that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, news coverage of Trump was 80% negative. They find that CNN and NBC were most negative, while even Fox was 52% negative.
The third is so open-ended that I can't imagine discussing it without agreeing on a bunch of specific standards for evidence and discussion, because it requires deciding where objective coverage of badness stops and partisanship starts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2014/05/2013-ame...
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...
Comically absurd. Trump injects himself into media headlines on a daily basis, more often than not because he's picking a fight on twitter with someone over something petty. He has nobody but himself to blame for his unfavorable coverage. Pretending he's a victim here is a cookie cutter case of amoral tribalism and rank partisanship.
What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.
The problem with this is that it assumes the value is proportionate to how much time you spend on something.
The value of good reporting is independent of the amount of time you spend reading the reporting.
That's why subscriptions make sense; you are supporting the company in a predictable fashion, which lets them have predictable amounts of resources, which ultimately supports the reporters doing the job.
I subscribe to the New York Times; and I'm happy to pay the same amount whether I read ten articles a month or one hundred. Why? Because I want to support the work they're doing. It's the same reason I subscribe to the Washington Post. It's also the same reason people should subscribe to their local newspapers. If nobody is reporting on local issues, then who is going to be keeping local government accountable?
this makes me think that journalism should be funded out of a commons fund - like how the BBC is funded publically via taxes.
In Sweden we are abandoning that concept because it is an unfair system and lots of people have switched to the internet for the same content (and don't even have a TV).
It is just one, insignificant, layer of indirection.
The BBC specifically has a trust issue in the UK. Even one of its own long term journalists wrote a book called "Can we trust the BBC?" (spoiler warning: the given answer is no).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Can-Trust-BBC-Robin-Aitken/dp/08264...
Tax-funded institutions that are not accountable to the people paying the tax is corrosive. Resentment builds and has nowhere to go. For now at least if you're willing to disconnect from broadcast television entirely, you can avoid paying the license fee. But similar license fees in other countries have been adapted to include the internet; it's hard to know if the same will happen in the UK.
My favourite recent example of ridiculous tabloid-level BBC journalism is "Brexit threat to sandwiches":
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44960293
Staying in the EU for a bit longer would keep the chiller cabinet full of sandwiches - but it would doubtless raise the political temperature.
The story literally argues that the UK would not have sandwiches anymore if no deal with the EU is reached. The sandwich was invented in the UK.
This is hardly an isolated example. Consider what sort of journalistic process led to this story being written, edited, reviewed and approved for publication. Is it one citizens should be forced to fund? What does that sort of thing do long term? Is it any wonder that trust in the press is in long term decline in the UK?
That is not what the article is about at all, "sandwiches" are just the hook. In fact the word sandwich only appears in the first sentence and the last. The article is about whether Brexit would lead to supply chain issues with food, which could result in food shortages.
Regardless of how you prefer to interpret the story, absurd clickbait "hooks" are the sort of thing that drives distrust in the media.
"Given these usage patterns, paywalls fail miserably. The typical consumer would have to sign up to hundreds of properties, costing thousands of dollars per month. If they consumed every bit of content at the New York Times, the $25/month could be fair. But they don’t, leaving them with a glut of extremely underutilized and over-priced subscriptions."
https://artplusmarketing.com/paywall-not-paywalls-8474092276...
If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no?
Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and probably higher then most non-tech, non-oil businesses
I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.
If you’re making “little or no profits” you have no ROI.
That's $24 million left unspent after salaries, benefits, travel and accommodation, equipment purchases, AP and Bloomberg fees, client entertainment, interest repayment, rents, board jollies...
I don't see what's unhealthily low about that profit.
Also, reporting faces heavy legal, travel, lodging, equipment, and food expenses and those don’t end up in the asset column in case of a sale. I guess the articles and copyright would help, but it doesn’t seem to be worth much.
EDIT: When you talk about "asset column" I'm assuming you mean the asset column in the books of accounts of the buyer.
If smaller newspapers cannot make it, it means they don't offer a good enough service to justify their existence. If they were good and provided value, people would pay for it (like they do the NYT).
Given the dismal quality of many small publications--possibly caused by the need to bring people via search engines--I welcome replacing them with independent content creators. Independent content creators often make even a lot of money via Patreon because people like their content and support them, and often the quality and level of knowledge is 100 times better than small publications that are only interested in clicks.
For instance, see the coverage of solar roadways, Hyperloop and many other science-related topics by specialized publications vs. the debunking videos made by youtuber Thunderf00t. While those publications will just have interns write copycat articles to bring in clicks, he's an actual scientist that looks into/debunks the topics at hand with a unique point of view, and actually covers the news critically. I'd much rather give him $5/mo. to keep producing good content then the "professional" newspaper $0.50/mo. to read their crappy content or even worse be bombarded by ads if I visit their website.
Of course, independent content creators will not take a plane to go cover a war or cannot afford to spend 2 years without publishing an article to do investigative journalism, but I think those publications that provide that value gets recognized by people and those will rightfully stay alive.
I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them.
The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.
I don’t think so. What happens is that the price would be too low to overcome the mental barrier of whipping out a wallet to pay for yet another recurring service, something people are only willing to do for larger websites.
We currently do not have a good solution for this. It’s weird to see so many HNers act like it’s a good thing that only large websites like NYT have a real business model once ads completely die. Or how Reddit will outlive individual forums because nobody is going to pay per forum.
But unless something changes, that’s going to be the reality soon.
Why does the price have to be low? You can pay yearly, for instance.
However, the main point I was trying to make is that with Patreon people voluntarily contribute $1, $5 or whatever. It hasn't been a problem and it's done every day.
If you're not willing to put up with "whipping out a wallet for yet another recurring service", it means you don't value the product.
Again, I don't even think it's the size of the website because many community-supported projects are 1 solo content creator.
Having "few" and "consolidated" reporting entities basically reflects the status-quo pre-internet, where at a local/national level you would have a handful of newspapers (or TV channels), each having often a fairly evident slant or clearly lobbying for a particular political party or social group.
But while we shouldn't view the past in an excessively positive way, it's hard to consider an improvement what we are moving towards, a situation where there are far and far more numerous and uncontrolled sources of infomation, amplified by social media.
At least (most) traditional newspapers always had the obligation of fact-checking, a burden that a spurious blog or forum post or twitter message doesn't have...
They're also tools that can shape or sway the public opinion. And not all markets have been profitable: in the UK, for example, the desire for political influence generated so many competing national newspapers that most of them lost money.
Also newspapers have been for a long time a business not particularly profitable on its sales, but on how its used to leverage other businesses. Failing Newspapers always find investors even if the biz is bad.
It’s great that individuals can funnel up stories that would otherwise be buried — but that’s no replacement for true journalism. Journalism hardly perfect, but does have a much, much higher bar.
That’s the role of journalists.. to find such videos and verify them. To put people on the ground in Syria, fact finding and interviewing.
It’s not like America is the only country with free as in speech journalism online — go read other papers if you believe the American ones are so distorted. My guess is you won’t find basic facts so challenged.
I have talked via chat to folks in Aleppo when they were getting shelled indiscriminately by rebels (whenever they intermittently had power/signal). I have spoken with English speaking Kurds. No-one liked Assad, but he is a secular leader and the best of a whole bunch of terrible options.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. Some very few media outlets like the UK's telegraph/independent went against the grain and confirmed several such stories independently. When the Battle of Aleppo was reaching its heights, Syrian civilians were being shelled by NATO weapons. All such claims were dismissed by the Obama administration at the time. Now they are slowly getting revealed:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-war-bosnia-saudi-...
Amnesty International came up with several reports of the 'moderate' rebels committing severe crimes. Some of these reports were quite heavily sanitised.
There was no celebration of non-Islamic festivals allowed until Dec 2016. Only after the Syrian Army won back Aleppo did Christians get back their voice. The heavy, spontaneous door-to-door celebrations on the street were never reported. All videos showing such celebrations were taken down in a few hours from youtube.
What I find amusing is nearly all of your vaunted, reputed American journalists took most of their stories word for word from the Syrian observatory for Human rights run by one guy in Coventry, UK and heavily funded by the government. On the ground Syrians weren't considered reliable sources for the Western propaganda machine. Most journalists were too afraid to go into 'moderate rebel' held territory. And any Western journalist reporting from Assad territory was considered suspect and mostly ignored.
The Syrian War was an expensive gambit sponsored by Western governments (with Saudi Arabian support) for regime change that failed in all its objectives, causing over a million deaths and destroyed the Syrian quality of life. I have nothing but utter contempt for the journalists who kept pushing propaganda and are still calling for war.
Meanwhile, UK/US/German weapons are being merrily dropped in Yemen and hundreds of Yemeni adults and children dying, but you don't hear a peep in the MSM, do you ?
Not to mention that real journalists also have become a thing on social media, without having to respond to editors in a newspaper.
I’ve written numerous upvoted posts sharing information about the Scandinavian public sector and tech-management, but I’m not a vetted source. I mean, you can’t even tell if I’m Scandinavian from HN.
My squabbling is relatively harmless of course, but it’s not always like this. If I was a different person I could’ve spent my time writing anti-vaccination stuff on another media, and people would have put the same sort of trust in my words. Not HN users, at least I’d like to think so, but a lot of people would have.
That’s insanely dangerous to a free society, because we rely on truth, and right now there really isn’t a lot of it going around.
Media and social media are trained like lab rats to pick up anything that is getting views and amplify it. The underlying architecture has to change. The feedback mechanisms that drive this must be slowed down or removed.
Or just get bots / click farmers to do all the work. The crackpots will latch on eventually...
We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system.
Trust in humanity's ability to adapt.
Plus, trolls funded by very well endowed state actors can now pretend to be among those "independent journalists" and completely muddy the waters.
Humanity doesn't always evolve for the better. The developed world lives in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity, but don't make the mistake of believing that progress is the norm or that we've reached the end of history. It's possible to throw it all away with stupidity, propaganda, greed and infighting, and I have no doubt humanity is fully capable of reverting to that. In fact, given a long enough timeframe it's probably inevitable.
Oh yeah, so the blockchain will somehow save this? (cough)
The best "consensus" system we've got for social media / forums is the upvote / downvote and that is a horrible indicator of truthfulness / factfullness / quality of something. Upvote / downvote is only an indicator of the prevailing groupthink on any given forum -- it is not a substitute for a reality check.
More important (IMO) is the number of subscribers, at total revenue, the total amount of money paid to NYT by subscribers. This is how much money is available to run NYT sustainably.
They had 3.8m subscribers, with 2.9m digital only. Revenue is/was $415m for the quarter (1.65bn annualized). $100m (25%) of that was from digital subscriptions. They make more from ads.
So... for the industry... I don't think this means much. It's an existence proof for paid subscriptions, as an important revenue source. It is not an existence proof for a paper funded primarily via subscriptions.
A remarkable (maybe even exciting to some journalists) is that this represents a digital version of the print business model. It's a good thing in the sense that this promotes good content, and less hyperbole and clickbait.
IDK how I feel about the desire to revive the print subcription model. The ability to share, read articles wherever they happen to be published, search the web for articles... paywalls break these. Maybe we need to go back to go forward, but this step feels like a regression... to me.
It really isn't. It's why wall street is selling on the news.
> This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.
It really isn't. It's why their share price dropped nearly 7% on the news. Their subscriber growth declined. That's not a good thing.
> NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.
NYT "switch" isn't even the most public or well-executed in their own industry. I'd give that nod to news corp and their properties - not that they are doing much better. NYT is playing catch-up.
> In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.
That's true. But the NYT is just as bought as any forum and gaslights as much as any politician. After all the NYT was created by a politician and a banker. It's in their DNA.
I do agree that fewer media entities will be detrimental to the republic. Unfortunately, the NYT along with CNN/WaPo is at the forefront of taking out smaller independent media entities.
If News Corp is the standard we're holding news companies to, we have a serious issue. It's totally disorganized, has no idea what it's trying to achieve and more focused on political outcomes than it is building actual value for shareholders. There is zero leadership, and that leadership there is gets sent to unrelated (but related) companies like Fox.
If it wasn't for a few golden gooses that News Corp acquired decades again, there is no way they could fund their cash burning newspapers.
NYT producing any positive revenue is amazing, i hope they continue to build upon this.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/tim...
(gotta link to the Guardian for that story because, of course, the Times' own coverage is paywalled)
I have no personal plans to buy their stock, but I'm not giving investment advice.
This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.
NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.
If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding.
This would confirm most of the newspapers out there are indeed running failed business models with zero opportunity for success.
The reason this is worrisome is going forward there will be less and less ‘diversity’ in the reporting ecosystem. Instead of 50 professional reporters confirmed writing about an event, we’ll have 5.
Reality and facts will be more about picking teams than believing the consensus.
In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.