"I keep wondering what would happen if the top 10 percent of the writers at the NYTimes just walked out," Arrington writes in a piece that also appeared in today's Washington Post. He hypothesizes that the best 10 percent of the writers and editors at the paper produce more than 50 percent of the real value of the newspaper. Imagine a start-up with all that talent, which had slogged off the Times' legacy financial problems: Ladies and gentlemen, the New New York Times!
To support his argument, Arrington cites Politico as a model: "Their news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the White House Bureau than any other brand. They have roughly the same traffic as we [TechCrunch] do -- 7 million monthly visitors --- but they've been around just half the time. How did they do it? The site was founded by well known political journalists who bailed to start their own company."
Yet, as Michael Wolff convincingly argued in the pages of Vanity Fair, Politico's success in finding an audience -- it isn't making money yet -- has much do to with its relentless focus on Washington politics: "Politico reduces the world to Rahm Emanuel and to the people who want to be Rahm Emanuel," writes Wolff.
The importance of that focus seems lost in Arrington's vision of the New New York Times. As Glynnis MacNicol writes on Mediate: "The point that Arrington appears to miss is that one of the reasons Politico is such a successful operation is that it's a niche operation. It has gathered top political reporters and made itself dominant in just one area, not all areas as the Times -- and most other national papers -- attempts to do (and arguably does better than anyone else). Politico is able to run a sleek organization because it's not required to staff itself to meet every global news need."
Forget the New New York Times. Maybe the top 10 percent of Times journalists would be better off defecting to create a whole host of different sites, tightly focused on the specific areas they cover. One real world example: Sharon Waxman's site, The Wrap, covers the entertainment biz. Waxman used to be a Hollywood correspondent for the Times.
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Richard Davis
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Comments
Ouch... I'm sure Phillip Morris' and the National Enquirer's business models are pretty solid, too.
And, by top 10 percent, are they including MoDo and Brooks and Michael Gordon in that percentage?
Other than aggregators like the Huffington Post, I really do think that "newspaper-style" online sites are not the way to go. I don't go to, say, MercuryNews.com to get "all the news;" I go to Salon, and TPM, and The Daily Dish, and read Dan Froomkin and some of the folks on The New Republic or The National Review (when I've taken my stomach medicine). For sports, I go to a sports site. For comics, a comics site. Etc.
The second is the question of who's going to cover the important yet not-so-popular news niches? Politico focuses on DC coverage because, as you say, DC is a popular beat. What about Afghanistan? Indonesia? Nigeria? I hear important things go on in those places, but they're so booorrrinng (if only Michael Jackson had visited Kabul, then we'd have a story!). If Kristof and Herbert leave NYT to start a news site focused on Africa, say, they'll be hard-pressed to attract numbers of readers. Ad revenues will be minuscule. At the same time, putting reporters on the ground in Africa is a lot more expensive than sending them to DC. If Politico can't make money on a DC beat, then how are folks like Kristof and Herbert going to make a profit covering Africa, or central Asia?
100 reporters cost a lot of money. Ads on the web bring in pennies, and even 7 million pennies don't add up to much. Nobody pays for news on the web because "information on the web wants to be free". This is a yawning $$ gap. It's telling that so many newspapers have gone out of business in the past 10 years, while no one's yet built a profitable, hard-news web business.
Selling stuff on the web makes money. Porn makes money. Celeb-fo-tainment makes money. Serious news on the web ain't making anybody any money. Or, to put it another way, what's Ariana Huffington going to skim when all the newspapers are gone? jr
How much per month would cover regular overseas reporting?
I'm serious. If you had 50,000 subscribers paying $5 a month each, that would be $250,000 per month, that would be $3 million a year (before taxes). That strikes me as possibly doable, if you had people whose reputation drew subscribers off the bat.
That's a lot of money if you are just paying people, but to the extent the firm provides expenses (travel, places to stay, maybe an office on location) it could go through that really fast. Maybe it would support regular and detailed coverage in and from one country (two or three if small neighbors, like the Balkan states).
Certainly this can be augmented by local stringers, something that's common now. Some are very good, they come cheaper and in the electronic era don't need an office. But stringers are only as good as the people who evaluate what they write, and the evaluators are only as good as their experience allows them to be. There needs to be an investment there.
Obviously I'm dubious, but maybe I'm missing something. So I ask you and the others--can the niche model fund good--and steady--foreign coverage?
It's a weird variation on the "free" model - that being, get such an overabundance of free material (such as producers of news / information, which is now considered free online) that your economies are based on volume.
Very odd, but perhaps not a bad thing for the industry.