Is the End Near For All Print Newspapers?

By Matt Saler

I was pretty shocked to read the other day that The New York Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., said the following words: “We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future.” He did not give a specific date to this inevitability but it begs the question… if the most read daily newspaper in the country goes strictly to digital, is it the beginning of the end for print newspapers as we know it?

Clearly, a lot of folks in the media industry were buzzing about this news, as many see digital as the present and future. If the majority of the revenue generated by the Times is from its online revenue, it only makes sense that this would be the direction that they would move toward. Business Insider blogger Henry Blogget conducted some interesting research on the topic and came up with the following numbers:


“We estimate that the NYT currently spends about $200 million a year on its newsroom and generates about $150 million of online revenue. If the paywall is highly successful—attracting, say, 1 million subscribers who pay $100 a year—this will add another $100 million of online subscription revenue (assuming the company doesn't lose ad revenue). With $250 million of revenue, the NYT might be able to sustain newsroom costs of about $100 million.

Now, a $100 million newsroom budget is a HUGE newsroom budget--one that most online publications would kill for. So the New York Times isn't going anywhere. But $100 million is also a lot less than the New York Times's current newsroom budget.

So if Arthur Sulzberger is right that the New York Times will eventually have to stop printing the print paper--and we certainly think he is--his company is likely to have to be restructured.”


As one who enjoys opening up a paper and reading through the news of the day, should I be worried that these days are quickly coming to an end? Stay tuned.

Matt Saler is a Senior Account Executive. He can be reached at matt@maroonpr.com.

Social Media Mistake by Washington Post Columnist

By Stefen Lovelace

It’s a new age for journalism. Every reporter has a Twitter handle and news is distributed to readers instantly. Journalists try to beat the competition on the Internet, Twitter and Facebook rather than in the next day’s newspaper.

This new age comes with a price though. Anything you put out there – whether it be a bylined story, or just a simple tweet – will be read as fact. With so much news, readers have a hard time filtering what’s true and what’s not.

Which brings us to Washington Post columnist Mike Wise. The longtime respected columnist made one of the bigger blunders of his career on Monday.

Wise tweeted that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games. Roethlisberger currently is suspended for six, but many have speculated that suspension may get reduced. The quarterback is a lightning rod for controversy right now, and diehard football fans are following any and every news item that comes out about him.

The tweet about Roethlisberger by Wise was a lie. He tweeted three times afterwards saying he had sources to back up his claim. All of this was made-up, or “a test” as Wise put it, to show how quick news and false news can spread throughout the internet.

It was a terrible mistake by Wise. I understand what he was trying to prove, but his approach was unthinkable. All a journalist has is his or her word and making up news is a cardinal sin in the journalism profession.

A journalist’s reputation “is on the line with every tweet, for better or worse,” [Columbia University Digital Media Professor Sree] Sreenivasan said. “People have a reasonable expectation that it’s accurate or the best of what you know at the moment.”

Wise was suspended for a month from The Post for his mistake. I think that’s about right, especially considering The Post is one of the most credible and well-respected newspapers in the country. Since social media is still so new, and there’s no real precedent for what to do in this situation, there was clear disagreement as to whether Wise’s punishment was just.

Yet within The Post, there was disagreement about whether the punishment fit the crime. Andrew Alexander, the paper’s ombudsman, wrote on his blog that Mr. Wise was “lucky he wasn’t fired.” Howard Kurtz, the paper’s media writer, wrote in a message on Twitter that the suspension “seems overly harsh to me.”

Twitter is a great resource for journalists and wonderful for spreading news. But this incident once again shows the importance of using caution and thinking before putting something up in the social media universe for the world to see.

Stefen Lovelace is an Associate Account Executive. Contact him at stefen@maroonpr.com.

Wall Street Journal Launches New York Section

By Stefen Lovelace

We have an official newspaper war.

On Monday, print heavyweight The Wall Street Journal unveiled its new “Greater New York” section. The section is being seen as a direct competitor to The New York Times, which has been New York’s top publication for local and regional news for years.


Taking over the grand ballroom of The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the Journal feted dozens of guests with a breakfast of bagels, quiche, coffee, Danish and other goodies. Large screens in the room promoted the new section's name, while top guns Les Hinton, CEO; Robert Thomson, managing editor; and Michael Rooney, chief revenue officer, headlined the event.

Each spoke out about why this venture, which many analysts and newspaper experts have said is financially limited, will succeed.

"This is good news for New York and good business for Dow Jones," Hinton told the crowd, adding that, in terms of advertising, "We didn't expect it to be as good as it has been."


This move shows that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which purchased the Journal in 2007, believes he can take down one of print’s most well-respected institutions.

There's a reason for his confidence. Earlier this week it was revealed that overall newspaper circulation has continued to declined, down 8.7 percent in a six month period ending March 31, 2010. That news in itself isn't all that surprising.

What is surprising is that The Wall Street Journal is the only one of the top 25 newspapers to rise in total circulation, going up by a very slight 0.5 percent. WSJ is also the No. 1 biggest daily newspaper in the country.

It’s too early to tell what type of effect the Journal’s jump into the New York news scene will have in the city. There have already been some that have ranked and compared the Journal against the Times, with reviews on WSJ's new section being mixed.

NYT hasn’t sat on its hands in this fight, as it’s now being reported that the newspaper is considering expanding its news coverage to include non-New York markets.


The Financial Times is reporting that the NYT has entered discussions to expand to provide regional coverage in five areas of the U.S. Eventually, the paper wants to provide local news for 10 to 15 markets, the FT reports.

It's possible that the paper's enhanced regional coverage is a response to the Journal and fellow News Corp. paper The New York Post's aggressive slashing of ad rates, a move widely perceived as an effort to eat into the Times' ad-client base.


It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, as the Times and WSJ are two of the largest and most reputable publications in the country. Stay tuned.

Stefen Lovelace is an Associate Account Executive. Contact him at stefen@maroonpr.com.

Newsday Pay Wall Having Limited Success

Author: Stefen Lovelace

Date: Thursday, January 28, 2010

I wrote a blog last week that detailed The New York Times strategy to start charging its subscribers to read NYTimes.com stories. In that post, I mentioned that many other newspapers would be watching to see what type of success The Times has doing this, as it could show whether online readers would be willing to pay for something that they were used to getting for free.

In October 2009, Newsday - a Long Island daily newspaper that has a top-12 national circulation - put Newsday.com behind a pay wall. According to The New York Observer, the number of subscribers to Newsday.com after three months is remarkably low.

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

That astoundingly low figure was revealed in a newsroom-wide meeting last week by publisher Terry Jimenez when a reporter asked how many people had signed up for the site. Mr. Jimenez didn't know the number off the top of his head, so he asked a deputy sitting near him. He replied 35.

According to the story, web traffic to Newsday.com has seen a sizable hit. In October, Newsday.com got 2.2 million unique visits. In December, just 1.5 million. Page visits normally equal advertising dollars, so the switch to a pay model may ultimately do much more harm to the bottom line than good.

What this means for The New York Times isn’t yet clear. The Times is much more of a national newspaper, so it’s possible that its far-reaching audience will be more willing to pay for the paper’s content. And not to take anything away from Newsday, but The Times is known for having some of the best reporting and stories of any newspaper in the country.

Still, I would have to think that The Times is paying very close attention to what ramifications Newsday will see from forcing online readers to pay.

I ended my New York Times post by asking how much true journalism was really worth.

Apparently not that much.

Stefen Lovelace is an Associate Account Executive. You can contact him at stefen@maroonpr.com.

NYTimes.com to Start Charging for Online Content

Author: Stefen Lovelace

Date: Monday, January 18, 2010

In August 2009, David Simon – the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO television show “The Wire,” top-selling author, and former reporter for The Baltimore Sun – penned a story for the Columbia Journalism Review that urged newspapers to make a major change in how readers access their online articles.

Simon urged The New York Times and The Washington Post, two of the biggest and most well-respected newspapers in the country, to start charging for their online content. He was one of the most vocal in defending the value of true, long-form journalism, and has argued that newspapers giving away their product for free will just continue to lead to plummeting circulation and advertising dollars. This cycle will eventually lead to newspaper’s ultimate demise.

For the past year, The Times has wrestled with the idea of going to some form of a pay site. NYTimes.com is one of the most popular websites on the internet, but their online advertising didn’t result in a big enough profit for The Times company.

It was reported yesterday by NYMag.com that The Times may have finally decided on a way to make readers pay for content.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

If this does occur, it could have a major ripple effect in the newspaper industry. Every newspaper around the country will be watching The Times to see if this works, as the major argument against having pay sites is whether readers would be willing to pay for something that they’re so used to getting for free.

The final decision could come this week, with a formal announcement to come within the next few weeks. According to the story, The Times wouldn’t start charging for content for months (perhaps starting in the spring).

The decision to go to a pay-site was not an easy one. Top-level employees at The Times had been debating the decision for the last year, with those that advocated to stay free citing the growth of the website, and the possibility of big profit coming in the future from web advertising.

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, [Times digital chief Martin] Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

Nisenholtz’s argument certainly has tremendous merit, and if the pay-site idea fails, it may be difficult to earn back a lot of the readers that NYTimes.com currently gets. The huge declines in advertising from the recession last year put pressure on the newspaper to act now with their pay idea or risk even more profit declines that they wouldn't be able to withstand.

Simon and others in favor of newspapers charging for their content ultimately got their wish and now we’ll see what impact this will have on the industry. With so many people used to getting online newspaper content for free – like readers, bloggers, online news sites, etc. – will those people be willing to pay for the written word?

At the very least, this model may help to answer the question: How much is true journalism really worth?

Stefen Lovelace is an Associate Account Executive. You can contact him at stefen@maroonpr.com.