This way to the egress (NYT)
Only 7:45 a.m. and it’s taking all my available processing resources to synthesize this morning’s NYT business section, which includes:
- A feature on how Boston is taking to the idea of having the New York Times Company shutter the Boston Globe;
- Yet another piece on hyperlocal web sites featuring Adrian Holovaty and evaluating the world of “news without newspapers”;
- David Carr musing on last week’s “saber rattling” by the Associated Press, on behalf of its members, in pursuit of revenue others generate from newspaper content;
- A disquisition on the truth about magazine subscription prices (in many cases, nearly zero) and the chances of successfully raising them (The Economist and People seem to be succeeding); and
- Various dispatches of varying lengths from the front lines of regime change.
There is little hint of après nous in this dystopian account of le déluge. I’m thinking there would have been enough gallows humor on the copy desk yesterday in NYC to create an entire stand-up routine.
If anyone, after being weighed in the balance of the marketplace, is found not wanting.
The magazine story is the most cheerful of those above, if only because it contains quotes from executives who not only believe in the value of their journalists’ content and filtering, but are willing to test their beliefs in the marketplace rather than sit by and see their kingdoms divided.
David Carr concludes, in what I can easily turn into another unintentional reference to the aftermath of Belshazzar’s feast,
“… newspapers have walked back the cat on the cost side as far as they can. Their gaze will inevitably turn toward consumers and the portals that serve them. The reckoning is at hand.”
As long as, while their gaze shifts, they think about what will bring pleasure and value to those consumers, creating a habit-based business as successful as those whose models are eroding by the minute, or by the inch. Otherwise, the Medes of Sunnyvale and Persians of Mountain View will indeed divide the spoils.