Mine Safety Disclosures Presents
October 28, 2020 3:45 AM   Subscribe

The (Not Failing) New York Times - "How The New York Times went from failing newspaper to thriving digital subscription business."
posted by kliuless (35 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was very interesting. I knew what their strategy was, but I didn’t know how well they were accomplishing it. Still not a fan of how they present certain news, but it is optimistic for the industry. Seems like a better model than wealthy owner or low-quality ad supported.
posted by snofoam at 4:45 AM on October 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


Yup, they've really pushed hard on the subscriptions front to quite a lot of success, although the untold part of the story is that this is another "the big get bigger" tale, where the NYT's national and international-sized brand allows it to dominate over smaller local papers. Ben Smith wrote about this problem in his first column at, yes, The New York Times.

I object to the idea that the NYT has a "best-in class app". I don't know if it's because I'm in the UK and that's slowing down the ad exchanges, but good apps don't take ten seconds to load up articles on a goddamn A12X iPad Pro with a fibre connection.
posted by adrianhon at 5:02 AM on October 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


That was completely fascinating. As an overseas American in Hong Kong I clamor for quality journalism from home and from here, and I have happily subscribed for years to the New York Times Digital (and the crossword app).

I am absolutely the millennial the author of this piece talks about toward the end: global outlook, left-leaning, never even lived in New York at all. In many ways, the first year I subscribed felt like a real extravagance (I'd never paid for news! The Guardian is free!), but I quickly tired of all the alternatives, given that I don't have a TV and would far prefer to read the news than watch it.

But really, what continues to sell me on the New York Times is their utterly unmatched (for a US-based paper) international reporting, especially their Hong Kong reporting in the last few years. The Times' coverage of Hong Kong's, uh, recent events - with local, Cantonese-speaking reporters and photographers and with translations of many articles into BOTH Chinese scripts! - confirmed for me that they had a better handle on the events of the day than nearly every other non-local source, including the British papers and the BBC, which seemed to never publish real opinion pieces, or do much more than report, often using non-local talent without the Chinese language skills they need to do reporting of the caliber I've come to expect from the Times. And that's not just true about this large, important city I live in: I've worked in a lot of places and the Times is present when something important happens wherever I happen to be, from Warsaw to Jakarta.

It's actually quite odd how I'm going to a news source 8000 miles away from here for some local news now, but the Times really is better in many ways. The day after the November 2019 District Council elections here, it wasn't the South China Morning Post publishing an amazing, succinct little set of maps and graphs showing the dramatic power shift - it was the New York Times, using two local reporters. The SCMP had access to the same data sources from the Electoral Commission, but just seemed content with a liveblog and getting to a similar-ish map was a maze of click-throughs and scroll-downs. In fact, I just searched for "district council election" on the SCMP site, and it won't even display any stories older than July 2020. Huge ads fill the entire screen mid-scroll. The SCMP also wants nearly $100 USD for a year of access to the site/app - not much cheaper than the Times with far, far less content relevant to anyone with a life, or a worldview, outside the city.
posted by mdonley at 5:10 AM on October 28, 2020 [19 favorites]


The downside to the digital-subscription model -

I don't have a subscription, but for a couple bucks I could go to a newsstand and get a single issue of the hard copy of the New York Times. Online, my options are "a subscription" or "nothing".

I would LOVE if online newspapers allowed for the purchase of a single article.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:52 AM on October 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


A few counterpoints:

- much of the growth in digital subscriptions is driven by Trump. The NYTimes has become the most visible anti-Trump outlet. You can tell that the NYT is playing this up by comparing digital and print headlines.

- I have found their coverage and writing to be getting worse and worse - but that’s just my reading. I haven’t found their reporting to be significantly better than 10 years ago, for example. It’s painfully obvious when they recycle articles (oftentimes I will find a print article that was published online a week ago) - which frankly just comes off as lazy. Also I think there is a difference between “good journalism” and “journalism that sells” - it’s clear they are shifting to the latter (e.g. firing their copywriters).

These two factors make me doubt the resilience of their flywheel in a post-Trump world (please Jesus take me there). But given they are probably going to be one of the last papers standing they could still come out great in a winner-takes-all end game.
posted by The Ted at 6:47 AM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


Yup, they've really pushed hard on the subscriptions front to quite a lot of success, although the untold part of the story is that this is another "the big get bigger" tale, where the NYT's national and international-sized brand allows it to dominate over smaller local papers. Ben Smith wrote about this problem in his first column at, yes, The New York Times.
I didn't actually see anything in that column about small local papers. The Times is dominating other *national* and New-York-centric papers, but I think that's pretty unrelated to the collapse of truly local papers. To the extent that local papers are losing readers to the Times, it's because they've been in a death spiral for two decades, and at this point they can't produce content that would convince anyone to pay for a digital subscription. A lot of people would prefer to subscribe to a local paper, rather than the Times, but there's no local paper worth subscribing to. And that's because local papers were always primarily funded by ad revenue, especially by classified ad revenue, and they never expected subscribers to cover the cost of putting out a paper. Once they lost that revenue, they couldn't afford to fund the kind of reporting and writing that they put out in the past, and it's really hard to ask consumers to pay more for a clearly-inferior product.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:54 AM on October 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


Who is "Mine Safety Disclosures" and why are they flogging the NYT stock (which has done pretty well already, the price curve largely matching the business recovery, which makes sense). But when someone's out there saying by eyeball that a business is going to grow 5x without a noticeable rise in costs, you gotta wonder: what's in it for them?
posted by chavenet at 6:55 AM on October 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


As an enthusiastic NYT reader and subscriber for many years, and someone who meets four of the five characteristics of the "total addressable market," I read this with interest. Though after having read it, I definitely have some admittedly nitpicky thoughts:

The revenue numbers on the "revenue and circulation" page seem to be identical to the numbers on this page (search for "Estimated advertising and circulation revenue").

It doesn't explicitly state if the numbers are adjusted for inflation, but if they are not (as I suspect), the 1956 number of $3.223 billion is at least 7x that in 2019 dollars. "At least" because it depends on how you convert -- using a straight consumer price index vs. a GDP deflator, etc. But even using the lowest converted value of approximately $23.7 billion is still a different story than the dramatic circa-2000 revenue peak that the graph seems to illustrate.

The pie chart also is totally missing the 40-50yo segment, and it doesn't really seem best practice to have two segments that are the same color (not to mention that the three segments of <30, 30-40, and 50+ are not at all equal).
posted by andrewesque at 6:57 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


This is fascinating and well done.

From a business perspective, clearly the NYT has had a stunning turnaround and a bright future.

For our society, the main disadvantage of a switch from advertising-based to subscription is: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
posted by gwint at 7:07 AM on October 28, 2020 [18 favorites]


EmpressCallipygos,

To buy articles a la carte, check out blendle.com (they're usually under 30 cents).

Their selection of periodicals is very limited and for some, are out of date, but it includes NYT, the economist, the new yorker, mother jones, and a few other outlets.
posted by fizzix at 7:39 AM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


Last time I checked you could buy individual NYT issues on a kindle as well.
posted by Wood at 7:43 AM on October 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I rolled my eyes so hard when I got to the slide that says "Despite being the third largest newspaper in the US and the most prestigious newspaper in the world..." and then supports it with an infographic that says nothing about the size of the NY Times and for world-wide prestige uses a metric based on an award that is only available to American newspapers.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:43 AM on October 28, 2020 [8 favorites]


I quite enjoyed that. I'm exactly one of those people NYT wanted to attract, and did - after the 2016 election shitshow, I decided it was time to put some money into supporting quality journalism. I debated getting a subscription to WaPo or NYT, and decided on NYT since it's geographically closer to me. I've been very happy with that decision, also because it gives me access to their crossword archives, and I happily start my day with the daily crossword every morning.

There are definitely drawbacks. It's a bit too expensive, it doesn't always get the balance right between NYC upper crust elitism and what the rest of the world thinks, I'm uncomfortable that it's pushing so many other news outlets out of business, and there are way too many opinion pieces for my taste. But with a few small caveats, I trust the NYT's reporting, particularly international (IMO, it is now better than the BBC, which I can't believe I'm saying) and feel that I'm absolutely doing the right thing by supporting them. I'm SO over letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
posted by widdershins at 7:44 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


To the extent that local papers are losing readers to the Times, it's because they've been in a death spiral for two decades,

According to the presentation, while the NYT reporting staff has grown by about 500, the number of US journalists has fallen by about 30,000. Those 500 reporters aren't covering your local school board meetings.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:44 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Thanks for posting. I subscribed after the 2016 presidential election due to increased static on other platforms I’d used previously, along with general how-can-we-fight-Trump feels. The constant online NYT dunkfest from my Very Left or Very Performative Left friends and colleagues accelerated under Trump, though, and for a time it weakened my faith in journalism and humanity. But when I asked myself why I subscribed in the first place and if it was still delivering what I sought, I came down resoundingly on “yes.” They do run op-ed content I don’t agree with, and more than occasional tone-deaf lifestyle stuff, but they continue to deliver quality journalism.
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:12 AM on October 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


According to the presentation, while the NYT reporting staff has grown by about 500, the number of US journalists has fallen by about 30,000. Those 500 reporters aren't covering your local school board meetings.
Right, I'm aware of that. And what I'm saying is that the reason for that isn't that the school-board reporter's salary used to be paid for by subscriptions to the local paper, and now that money is going to the New York Times. It's that the school board reporter's salary used to be paid for by classified ads for real estate, and now people hunt for houses on Zillow and apartments on craigslist. There is no money for local reporting, because the internet killed the main revenue source for local papers. That's the reason my local paper doesn't cover the school board. And now that my local paper doesn't cover the school board, it's really hard for me to justify paying for a subscription to it, although I do. But I subscribe to the local paper basically as a public service, because it's such a garbage publication at this point that I don't really feel like it's an important part of my information diet.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:29 AM on October 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


I live in New York and my wife and I are both in the culture industry, so dumping the Times is not an option, BUT I recently added a subscription to the Washington Post and I'm enjoying it more than NYT.

- WP seems to "scoop" NYT on political stuff, and cover it in a more fine-grained way. As you would expect.
- the upper-middle-class perspective is much less apparent on WP. There are no "Styles of the Times"-type stories and the prose is more workaday across the board.
- WP has a working comments section
- WP does not paywall food articles. This is maybe the most galling thing at NYT. How does my $15/month not cover a few recipes?
- I haven't yet learned to hate the WP opinion columnists. Part of that seems to be because the editorials are "below the fold" on the WP website, but NYT puts them top right where they can bleat for your attention. I'm even tired of Krugman at this point.

So, good for them that they managed to get into the black, but given the choice, you could try the Washington Post.
posted by anhedonic at 8:30 AM on October 28, 2020 [12 favorites]


ArbitraryAndCapricious: True, the Ben Smith article was more about previously-niche publications (e.g. entertainment, politics, etc.). As far as competing with local papers goes, yes, the NYT isn't covering your local school board, but I think it's benefitting from (or contributing to) the nationalisation of politics wherein people seem to be less interested in their local school board and more interested in national issues. I don't live in the US and even if I did, I'm sure this is happening to different extents in different locations, but it's a refrain I've heard a lot and it'd explain why, e.g., local political races are now attracting donors from across the country.
posted by adrianhon at 8:36 AM on October 28, 2020


Seconding WashPost. Although my heart will always belong to the NYT (it's my hometown paper), I agree with everything anhedonic said. Look out for deals from them. I caught a sale for a year-long subscription to WashPost and it has been great.
posted by Chickenring at 9:14 AM on October 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I support newspapers. I was a long time NYT subscriber who quit in 2016 because of their shitty coverage. I also once subscribed to the WSJ, which isn't as horrible as it's editorial pages, but did decline some after the Murdoch purchase. I currently subscribe to three (or maybe two and a half): WaPo, LA Times, and Talking Points Memo.

Apologies this got so long, but newspapers need to be more than just "the New York Times" to have a healthy country:

Yup, they've really pushed hard on the subscriptions front to quite a lot of success, although the untold part of the story is that this is another "the big get bigger" tale, where the NYT's national and international-sized brand allows it to dominate over smaller local papers.

100% this. The New York Times is not a meaningful model for anyone else. It has a unique brand name. Other newspapers trying to mimic their behavior would be like me getting dating tips from Cary Grant.

One case in point is Buzzfeed, which has had layoffs in the last year. They have talented reporters--indeed, they have the same reporters that the NYT hires away at triple salary. What happens if Buzzfeed starts a subscription model? Can they increase salaries? Yeah, right. Paywalls reduce their ad revenue--and how many NYT subscribers cancel their subscription and pay for Buzzfeed instead? Zero, that's how many. A subscription model for Buzzfeed isn't a virtuous cycle, it's a death spiral.

Some examples of how the Times brand power works:

They have been repeatedly criticized in the industry for grabbing stories initially reported on by some other outlet, doing their own reporting, adding a bit more, and then doing a front page story that gives the original reporting little or no credit. Once they do this the story becomes big news, because it was on the front page of the Times. So no one can do this to them. It's a unique use of market power and reputation.

Or, in 2016 and 2017, they were far behind the curve in reporting on Trump--but they broke some legitimate big stories when sources came forward. Stories that basically fell in their lap. Why would you, armed with anti-Trump info, come to the Times when the Post was doing better work? Well, because people pay attention to it on the front page of the Times; it'll have the most impact published there.

The Times is basically essential reading. I routinely hit my limit on free stories, and while I personally refuse to resubscribe because of some of their editorial choices most people aren't going to be motivated by my prickliness.

The Post is good but not as good on the non-Trump stuff--they don't have the deep pockets to get the breadth once you're inside the paper. But they are like the other national paper, with the WSJ the one that can sort-of follow the Times and stay afloat.

How we revive local reporting . . . That's the question the country needs to answer and I don't have a clue.
posted by mark k at 9:28 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I subscribe to the Times mainly because of MetaFilter. If it weren't for the regular links here tapping out my monthly limit by the first week of every month, I wouldn't bother.

I subscribe to the Washington Post mainly because of Carolyn Hax.

The only Canadian news site I subscribe to is The Walking Eagle news, because the CBC is free.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:43 AM on October 28, 2020


The pie chart also is totally missing the 40-50yo segment,

Consistent with everything else in life.

Funny, I was just reading about Time magazine and how they (among other things) learned nothing from the AOL disaster, and are still thinking print! print! print!. (During the pandemic they've gone bi-weekly, which makes them even less relevant for breaking news, ah well.) Good for the NYT for figuring out that part of it. What a concept--investing in journalism, not the Boston Red Sox!!

Yeah, I'm on team WaPo these days. NYT is just so tone deaf sometimes, being a big NY real estate baron like a certain president. (They got in big trouble in the 80s, IIRC, for taking some Manhattan land by "eminent domain" and kicking out some family businesses who had been there forever.) They run op-eds by wingnuts and then say "oops, we were just trying to show a different point of view, we didn't realize they were wingnuts." And just a few weeks ago there was a home article by a guy who was stuck in his second home on Long Island and just hated it.

And I'd die without Carolyn Hax.
posted by Melismata at 10:13 AM on October 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


I got WaPo and NYTimes on the cheap this February because I was sick of my red state's media and this was a year I wanted to keep informed on. We'll see what the renewal rates are come February 2021. If Hair Furor is out of office, I much more inclined to stay on. I can't take another four years of crimes and bullshit. I'll be busy converting the basement into a bunker.

I'm getting paywall nonsense from Slate now. Slate has its issues but I have grown dependent on it. Still, I think I will walk away. I'd love to subscribe to Defector but that's kinda pricey for me. I'm dropping Medium. And don't even get me starting on all the pay for streaming video services.
posted by Ber at 11:25 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


> Who is "Mine Safety Disclosures" and why are they flogging the NYT stock (which has done pretty well already, the price curve largely matching the business recovery, which makes sense). But when someone's out there saying by eyeball that a business is going to grow 5x without a noticeable rise in costs, you gotta wonder: what's in it for them?

The deck was a good read and tells a good story. On another hand, it doesn't look like a wise stock pick to buy into now: market enthusiasm & a belief in this journey to the promised land of year-after-year revenue growth supported by fixed costs already seems baked into NYT's share price: NYT shares do not look like a bargain stock pick at ~50x earnings , they're priced higher by the market than earnings from microsoft or google (both priced around 35x earnings). As a business, the new york times seems to be priced comparatively to netflix, which has shares priced at ~70x earnings. For reference, the nasdaq index was priced at around ~200x earnings before the dot-com bubble popped, and telsa shares are currently priced at around ~1000x earnings, i.e. priced 5x higher than dot-com bubble era market prices of companies with "e" in their name.

All that said: it seems much healthier to have a business model where you provide a service directly to customers, and the customers then pay you in return for that service -- hopefully the subscription revenues let them keep the lights on and keep the journalism flowing.
posted by are-coral-made at 11:49 AM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


We have a print subscription, but that doesn't seem to let me read their online stuff anymore, even though it used to... Not sure what's up with that.
posted by Windopaene at 12:10 PM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


I don't have a subscription, but for a couple bucks I could go to a newsstand and get a single issue of the hard copy of the New York Times. Online, my options are "a subscription" or "nothing".

Online, they give you a certain number of free articles per month (not sure what the number is now), which is considerably better than the print edition, which gives you no free articles (except whatever you can read on the front page at a newsstand).
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:25 PM on October 28, 2020


We have digital subscriptions to both the NYT and the WaPo. I'm old enough to have had issues with both papers over the years (especially in the Iraq War era), and the Times still has its frequently awful lifestyle coverage (I like to refer to it as "The Hardships of the Rich: A Continuing Series"). But at this point, they are both essential reading, and worth the money.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:27 PM on October 28, 2020 [3 favorites]


Two things rather put me off the NYT: the first was having to pay extra for recipes, and the second was trying to cancel my *#! subscription when I moved back from NY to London.

Heck, the hoops I had to jump through... it took months to get them to stop taking money from my account (apparently my bank couldn't just stop the transfers) even though I couldn't use my sort-of-canceled subscription. It would make me very wary of ever setting such a thing up with them again.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 12:39 PM on October 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Without reading the article, I'm going to guess trolling MetaFilter by posting pictures of refrigerators.

The answer is subscriptions? Okay, NY Times, I unsubscribed because I got tired of all the articles about sad white Trump voters whose feelings are hurt when they get called racist, but I will re-subscribe if you add a "dislike" button to the Styles section. Lbr you know even their families are hatereading those profiles.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:00 PM on October 28, 2020


Yeah, NO. Every time I think I should give the Times a shot I recall the Iraq war and decide that my money is best elsewhere. I figure that MeFi would curate the most interesting and relevant articles and I don't give a hoot on the travails of New York's wealthy.

Let's be honest, journalism in America can take three forms: watchdog, junkyard dog, or lap dog. I put the New York Times more in the last two categories than the first.
posted by jadepearl at 2:20 PM on October 28, 2020


school board reporter's salary used to be paid for by classified ads for real estate, and now people hunt for houses on Zillow and apartments on craigslist

Zillow should have US school board reporters, given our schools/real estate imbrication. It might be interesting to have reporters who specialize in school boards but cover several districts, to be able to compare them.
posted by clew at 2:35 PM on October 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


> Who is "Mine Safety Disclosures" and why are they flogging the NYT stock

I've long wondered who runs MSD and have never been able to find out. Their breakdown of Costco is legendary. Seems like they do one of these per year.
posted by rossmeissl at 6:55 PM on October 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


I got a couple of slides into this and felt like I was in Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.
posted by neuron at 10:17 PM on October 28, 2020


The good news about NYT making you phone to cancel is that I got an introductory subscription ($4/month). When they bumped me up to $15/month, that was too much. When I phoned to cancel, they put me back on $4 for another year.

Is the information at the top link available in some other form? I really don't like reading tiles.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:49 AM on October 29, 2020


I'd never paid for news! The Guardian is free!

And there you have it.

How does my $15/month not cover a few recipes?

I was in the field when the NYT launched cooking.nytimes.com and man, we quivered. While we can debate the racism of their recipe development cycle anytime, the actual interface and the recipe tools are really good and really hard to get right, mostly because other organizations were fighting off things like "How do we embed sponsored Kraft Cheese Whiz recipes." Etc. But the NYT had the luxury of money, I assume, to just create something great knowing that they would be able to run the darn thing afterwards. I particularly like how they eschewed the ingredient-based tag system everyone else was fighting their way through and went straight to a great search tool.

So what I'm saying is, they built a Cadillac and now they are charging for it. Pssst my free library pass to the NYT gets me access to their recipes.

It’s painfully obvious when they recycle articles (oftentimes I will find a print article that was published online a week ago) - which frankly just comes off as lazy.

There's this thing called digital first, where you publish stories online and then decide which ones are valuable enough to put on dead trees - sometimes based on editorial vision and sometimes straight out analytics. It can actually let you pool your resources better, which I guess is "lazy" in some ways. The number of people comparing the digital and print versions is probably fairly small and probably not a factor in digital growth.

All three of my comments above relate to resources, because any publication you would like to see continue needs money to run, and paying for it is the best way to do that. The NYT had brand power and wasn't as reliant on forms of advertising that were disappearing, and that plus some serious vision and leadership let it grow its subscriber base. But that is what [insert your favourite thing to read here] needs, money.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:55 AM on October 29, 2020 [5 favorites]


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