But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers? If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience? You can't be the world's best and fail at the same time.
Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop.
The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time".
This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers.
Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs.
On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about.
Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once.
Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online.
Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us.
Today, the newspapers' editorial focus is to create random packages of news.
Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events.
They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos.
With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.
> because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist
I am glad to read an article like the original post, about how the incentives of the world we live in distort the effects of the things we consume. I am distressed to read top comments like yours, which lazily declare that the world sucks because you're too smart. Even if you were right, and you're not, you wouldn't change anything.
For instance, your comment about '"intellectual goods" like art' is completely off the mark. Having dabbled in both music and writing, I have found that there's a huge difference in attitude between your stereotypical "starving artists" and people who produced art and music that the world actually liked, if only a little bit beyond their circle of friends.
Generally, the people who ranted the most about popular art were people who least understood how to craft music or writing that people wanted to read. This sort can often be found roaming university halls and earning degrees making art nobody actually wants. On the other hand, the guys who played at bars, or published stories in small magazines, almost universally had respect for the extraordinary amounts of talent in even the "lowest" books and music, even if they strongly disagreed with the value of the art. They also had very sharp analytical and critical minds when it came to the art in question.
The world doesn't suck or not. The world is. For me the world often sucks, and I realize that there is little I can do about it. I would if I could, and I try my best in my own small corner of it.
Because I was, for four years, a regular long form writer, and later a bi-weekly columnist, in the most prestigious weekly magazine supplement in my own small country, I can actually provide some first hand perspective. The newspaper the magazine belonged to was the NYT of my country, and "enjoyed" a readership of just a little over 100,000. That isn't enough to keep the paper going (it's still around, but it's uncertain for how long).
Obviously everything is on a spectrum. While I expressed myself in black and white terms in my first comment, my point is that there is little correlation between quality and success, and I stand behind it. The fact that some quality writers and musicians achieve some level of success -- some of them enjoy quite a great deal of it -- is not enough to change the overall picture. A newspaper isn't an individual writer or artists. It's a big business with very high costs. Modest success enjoyed by a writer is total failure for a newspaper, because a newspaper needs some specific measure of financial success in order to break even. For a newspaper, the outcome is often binary: live or die. It can't generate a side income like an artist could.
As to the last paragraph of your comment: I agree, but that has little bearing on the matter at hand. I love popular art, and I enjoy popular news outlets (like Gawker) immensely. But I wasn't saying that the people creating popular art aren't smart or talented. I was merely questioning whether highbrow art or journalism is economically viable. As far as art goes, we know the answer: it isn't. Pretty much every art museum in the world and every opera troupe is state supported. This may or may not be the case for journalism as the NYT practices it.
As a matter of fact, I'm not even lamenting the state of affairs. I was simply reeling against the assumption that popularity is any sign of quality; that's all.
To add a little more information about the paper business -- to those interested -- I'll explain that a newspaper survives by cross-subsidizing reporters. You maintain a bureau in France and one in Iraq. When there's something interesting going on in Iraq, people buy the paper to read about that. When something happens in Europe, people buy it for that. But the cost of the paper stays the same, and it's not a price anyone would pay for a single article. Once you unbundle the package and allow people to read (and generate revenue) for a single article, the entire business model becomes unsustainable. You simply can't pay for the guy in France with the little money generated by the guy in Baghdad. Saying something like "you should produce more interesting content" misses the whole point of how a newspaper works. You can produce all the interesting "content" in the world, but you still won't know what's going on in Europe or Iraq. You can't have "unbundled" beat reporting (although you can have unbundled, occasional, long-form magazine assignments), because maintaining eyes and ears somewhere requires a constant cost whether or not there are good stories there at the moment.
> if The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly?
I don't understand how a paper that seems to have fired all its researchers and fact checkers can be considered winning at journalism. They continually cannot get the senators from certain states (North & South Dakota) and print unverified opinion as fact.
It is a bit simpler than that though. The NYT is no better than Fox News or MSNBC in its partnership. People don't like to continually read a paper that insults their beliefs in the editorial pages when I can just go to Yahoo and see what's going on.
The low for me was when a ND Senator (whom the identified as coming from South Dakota) has to set them straight on how a hunt in a National Park will save a lot of elk (kill a few vs. starvation), I realized they have no idea how nature or the national parks work and were unwilling to find people who did.
You're right, the NYT isn't perfect; far from it. They don't know many things they should, and they sometimes fall prey to their own biases. But they're still a lot better than MSNBC or Yahoo (I'm not sure how they can be compared to Fox News, which "reports" more fiction than fact, so it can't really be considered news at all). You can't really go to Yahoo and see what's going on. At best you'll get anecdotes collected by the news agencies, but they don't have the people to put it in context.
Fox News during the day[1] isn't terrible other than their love of the same "hot" story but their is really no difference between them and CNN these days. MSNBC is 100% pundits all the time to the embarrassment of NBC's actual news staff. If you mean the IRS or Benghazi as false stories then we would have a bit of a disagreement given the documents the gov has released and that whole e-mail story.
Yahoo is an aggregator for normal news and does have quite a bit of original content in selected verticals. I will say they point to local papers that tend to get it right. I don't see any advantage to the "putting it in context" when it is such a prejudice and not-very-well-facted-check lens. The NYT (like CNN) is riding on an old reputation.
CNN asked if a black hole could be responsible for a missing airline flight.
1) at night is a whole different story - everyone has pundits everywhere
Of course you can. In fact, that's the normal order of things, because people don't want the best -- they want mid-lowbrow. Ask every starving genius writer/artist. If this logic were correct then crack is the "best" product in the world. Everyone who tries it wants more, so much so that it's physically hard to stop.
The sad truth is that quality and popularity rarely intersect, especially when it comes to intellectual "goods" or art. In fact, producing the best quality in those fields is almost a certain assurance of failure. I would say, "you can't be the world's best and succeed at the same time".
This is also why advertising is failing for newspapers. In a digital world where intent is paramount for advertisers, it's far more valuable to target your advertisers for when people are looking for something specifically, rather than the random 'I don't know what I'm going to get' that we see from the newspapers.
Advertising is failing for newspapers because the revenue it generates is lower than the cost of production, and the revenues are low because of competition with sites that have low production costs.
On social channels, we define what we are interested in by following people and brands that match what we care about.
Yes, and unfortunately quality newspapers and magazines are directed at people with broad horizons and open minds that trust the editors' choices. At people who think, "if the NY Times thinks it's newsworthy then I'd better read it". That actually used to work once.
Following The New York Times on Twitter is just like paging through a print newspaper. Each tweet is about something completely unrelated to the tweets before it. And this is the opposite of why people usually follow people and brands online.
Yes because people are crack addicts. That's what works in the market, but that's not necessarily what's "good" for us.
Today, the newspapers' editorial focus is to create random packages of news.
Yes, well unfortunately that's what the world is. A random package of events.
They are all over the place, and as such there is nothing that we as viewers can connect with. There is no momentum, passion, or reason for watching any of these videos.
With that I actually agree. Of course, if they were to create the journalism they really wish to, they'd fail even harder, but that's another matter.