The NYT sells front page ads. This isn’t as shocking as I thought it might be. Major papers all over the world do it, why not us? Major US papers have been doing this for a while. But, as the national paper of record, everything that happens at or to the New York Times is historical.
Similar to Bschra (Bschrau?), I’m fully of the belief that print will never recover in any meaningful way. I’m still a news nerd, though. Therefore I should still be held rapt by developments like this. Oddly enough, I’m not. The blind hubris and short-sighted greed of the newspaper industry’s daily failure to innovate just makes me not care anymore.
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Discussing this with Al, we both came to the same conclusion as you but for different reasons. There’s really no problem with the Times selling ads on the front page - sure, it violates the sanctity of the news front, but if you gotta do it to keep the paper afloat you gotta do it.
But as Al pointed out, the bigger problem comes in the second year. People are already used to seeing that ad on the front page - it’s no longer novel, and the amount you can sell it for starts to slip. Now what?
The actual reason I commented was in reference to the impending death of the printed page. I don’t see it happening, at least not for a while, and the reason is old people. Old people are the cause of newspapers are still around, and as long as there are old people, there will be newspapers. We’ve still got another good 30 years or so before the techies finally become “elderly,” and in the meantime you’ve got people who don’t particularly care to read the internet for their news.
Though my evidence is admittedly nowhere near empirical, my venture down to Arizona produced one interesting nugget - The Arizona Republic regularly publishes EIGHT sections, each brimming with ads.
Now, you can argue that they have a fairly wide geographic distribution area (with 1.5 million subscribers), but I feel comfortable attributing at least a significant number of the papers sold to simple demographics: An overwhelming percentage of the population down there is elderly. They either a) don’t have ready access to the internet, b) don’t know how to access the internet/news web sites or c) simply don’t care for the multimedia-rich experience everyone under 35 currently craves.
So aside from advising people who want jobs in journalism to venture into senior-laden areas, I would say that newspapers are NOT necessarily fucked (though that’s not say they’re going to be fine, either). Instead of focusing solely on hyper-local (which by definition kind of limits the paper’s possible audience), they need to go back to the ol’ readership survey and find out exactly who is reading the stupid thing and why.
I would merely advise starting with the septugenarians.
Also, I think legally in order to shorten BShraw’s name you have to transmogrify the “u” to a “w.”
I felt the same yawn as you, Tor. I read the headline (on the Times site, no less) and didn’t feel any interest in caring further. Being sad about change is just too counterproductive. Either it’s a smart business decision or it’s a stupid business decision and either way it doesn’t even come close to touching any of the real problems or potential solutions newspapers have these days.