Tag: New York Times

More powerful than Googlezon!*

One of my favorite bomb-tossers, John Ellis, has uncorked a doozy. In a column for the Web site RealClearMarkets, Ellis proposes that Google make an offer to the New York Times Co. that it can’t refuse. Ellis’ arguments:

  • Mega-wealthy Google could easily afford to buy the Times Co., the price of which will only keep dropping.
  • Even though the Times Co.’s controlling stock is owned by members of the Sulzberger family, who don’t want to sell, there’s a point beyond which the family can no longer screw other shareholders.
  • Rupert Murdoch seems determined to transform the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor to the Times on all kinds of news, not just financial — and he can afford to run the Journal at a loss.
  • Google, like Murdoch, doesn’t need to turn a profit with a small investment like the Times — but may make money anyway if it can leverage Times content across multiple platforms.
  • Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. isn’t getting it done, and has been in charge for so long now that it seems clear that’s not going to change.

Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist, offers some provocation for us locals as well, suggesting that Google could get the price down to a mere $3 billion or so by selling off the Times Co.’s other properties, including the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its share of the Red Sox and of New England Sports Network. (If the right buyer for the Globe can be found? Go ahead, make my day. But that’s a big if.)

Ellis’ piece is a suggestion, not a prediction. Still, it’s worth noting that in October 2006, when it looked as though a group headed by retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch might buy the Globe, Ellis wrote: “Mr. Sulzberger would be a fool, of course, to sell the Globe to anyone at this juncture.”

He was exactly right. Which raises the question of whether Times Co. executives now would be fools not to sell the Globe.

Ellis’ proposal is logical, if unlikely to happen. But given that all of our great news organizations are going to have to find new, once-unthinkable ways of surviving, I can imagine a worse fate for the Times than landing in the arms of Google, which generally, though not always, lives up to its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Better Google than Murdoch, certainly. (Via Romenesko.)

*Click here for reference.

Hoyt’s mixed bag on Kristol

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s column on the hiring of William Kristol is disappointing, but entertaining nevertheless.

It’s disappointing because he quotes the most unhinged, illiterate e-mails the Times has received so that he can claim that at least some Kristol-bashers are nothing but ignorant haters, and because he blows right past the criticism that Kristol “is an activist with the potential to embarrass The Times with his outside involvements.” Well, yeah. That’s disqualifying, or at least it ought to be.

But Hoyt is right on the money in flogging Kristol for publicly urging that the Times be prosecuted for committing the sin of journalism against the Bush administration. And he’s touchingly naive in saying that Kristol’s refusal to talk to him was “an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.”

Does Hoyt really think Kristol is going to do any reporting?

Channeling no one but himself

New York Times reporter Michael Powell asserts that John McCain is borrowing rhetoric from Barack Obama. Yet in his only example, he shows that McCain is borrowing from himself:

Mr. McCain admits to admiring Mr. Obama’s appeal as a “wonderful thing” and has taken to borrowing a line or three. He has been channeling Mr. Obama, calling on Americans to “serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” a theme from his campaign in 2000.

Indeed it is a theme from McCain’s 2000 campaign. So why does Powell say that McCain is “channeling Mr. Obama”?

The trouble with Bill Kristol

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the New York Times’ decision to give an op-ed-page column to William Kristol. The problem, I argue, isn’t that he’s a neocon who was wrong about Iraq and who’s being irresponsible about Iran. Rather, it’s that the Times has bent its ethical rules to give a platform to someone who sees journalism as just another form of political partisanship.

Missing in action

I’m not one of those purists who believes all candidates, no matter how marginal, must be included in all media coverage. But it strikes me as pretty lame if you can’t find a way to wedge everyone into a chart explaining where they all stand on the issues.

So I was struck by a chart on pages 14 and 15 of today’s New York Times that excludes Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel and Republican Duncan Hunter. I can think of no reason why the Times’ editors would have left them out other than poll numbers so minuscule that they can’t be taken seriously. So let’s take a look.

First, the most recent national poll — a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics survey taken in mid-December — shows, on the Democratic side, Kucinich and Gravel with 1 percent each. That’s very low indeed, but not quite as low as the virtual zero scored by Chris Dodd. And, given that the margin of error is plus or minus 5 percent, those numbers are really no different from Bill Richardson’s 2 percent or Joe Biden’s 3 percent.

On the Republican side, Hunter scores a lowly 2 percent, just below Ron Paul’s 3 percent. Again, no real difference — a point that becomes even clearer if you look at Hunter’s and Paul’s numbers over time, which essentially show each bouncing around 1 percent to 3 percent.

What prompts the Times chart today, of course, are the Iowa caucuses, which will be held on Thursday. So do the Iowa polls show Kucinich, Gravel and Hunter lagging so badly behind everyone else that they uniquely deserve to be left out? Well, sort of, but not really.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll of likely Republican caucus-goers, also conducted in mid-December, Hunter scored just 1 percent, while the next-lowest candidate, John McCain, had 6 percent. (I’m excluding Tom Tancredo, who’s left the building.) So there’s at least an argument to be made for Hunter’s not making the cut. Among likely Democratic caucus-goers, though, no such rationale emerges. Kucinich and Dodd are tied at 1 percent each and, in previous polls, Kucinich did slightly better than Dodd. (Gravel was left off the most recent survey, although his Web site shows that he’s still doing campaign events.)

By leaving off Kucinich, Gravel and Hunter, the Times demonstrates a clear bias toward conventional thought. Among the Democrats, Dodd has performed as poorly as anyone, yet he’s included — and he has been included in every debate, unlike Kucinich and Gravel. The difference is that Dodd is a mainstream liberal and a senator, well-liked by the media and a proven provider of good quotes.

Kucinich, on the other hand, is a radical congressman with a prickly personality. He’s got some interesting ideas, but when does that ever have anything to do with it? Gravel, admittedly, is a loose cannon. But if you’re going to start excluding candidates from issues charts, debates and the like, then Dodd, and even Richardson and Biden, are no more serious about winning the nomination than Kucinich or Gravel are at this point.

It’s at least somewhat clearer among the Republicans. Paul has raised a ton of money and is the darling of Internet libertarians. Although he’s not going to win the nomination or the presidency, he may run as an independent, which would be one of the big political stories of the year. Given that, Hunter really is the least plausible Republican, the longest of longshots. But he’s a congressman and he’s just one guy. Why leave him out?

The Des Moines Register has an issues chart online as well, and everyone is included. Not that that proves anything — the Times’ online issues chart also includes everyone, even candidates who’ve dropped out. (Locally, the Boston Globe has a similar feature online.)

This was the Times’ last chance before the voting begins to tell readers of the print edition — and there may be more than a few Sunday subscribers in Iowa — where all the candidates who are still running stand on a variety of issues. Yes, it’s graphically pleasing to make it appear that there are six Republicans and six Democrats running; the column widths are easy on the eye. But it’s not true.

Corrections and blogging standards

The New York Times’ Virginia Heffernan, blogging at The Medium on NYTimes.com, recently wrote that neo-Nazis were portraying Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul as one of them. She didn’t check with Paul. Hence the lengthy “Editor’s Note” that now precedes the item.

As it turns out, this is interesting fodder for a consideration of blogging ethics. If Heffernan had contacted neo-Nazi groups, gotten their version of events, and then failed to do the same with Paul, well, that would be an obvious journalistic lapse. But that’s not what she did. Instead, in classic blogger style, she pointed to accounts elsewhere, particularly in Little Green Footballs, which, as she notes, has a reputation for being “rigidly empiricist.”

Which means that I’m not sure how I come down on this. I don’t think any blogger believes you should have to verify independently everything you link to as long as you’re linking to a reasonably reputable source. On the other hand, there’s no question that the New York Times can do a lot more damage to someone’s reputation than Little Green Footballs. So perhaps the standard does need to be different.

There’s also the matter of how blogs root out stories. This became a subject for discussion at a New England News Forum conference at Southern New Hampshire University recently, as we pondered Talking Points Memo’s efforts to determine whether or not Mitt Romney had ever said he would never appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet. (As we now know from the Martin Luther King Jr. story, you would first have to figure out how Romney defines “never,” “appoint,” “Muslim” and “Cabinet.”)

TPM has been doing it open-source-style, putting half-vetted stuff out incrementally and letting the story emerge over time in a very public way. It’s a fascinating methodology, and one quite different from the closed-system model used in traditional journalism. But it can be pretty devastating to someone’s reputation if it turns out to be untrue — a position taken at the conference by, among others, David Tirrell-Wysocki, an Associated Press executive who’s also the executive director of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester, N.H. From the “running notes”:

“I’m held accountable,” said Tirrell-Wysocki. “But who is holding the blogger accountable? That’s the downside as I see it.” He said blogs are akin to the conversation at the doughnut shop: “It’s what people are talking about.”

Essentially that is what LGF is doing, preceding its post on Paul by saying, “Take this one with a grain of salt, please,” but then laying out the accusation. Heffernan’s post is equally skeptical, as she concludes that “maybe it was only a matter of time before Paul got roasted on his own spit, i.e., the Internet.” Now Heffernan is getting roasted on the Internet, too.

Hoyt says Times erred on MoveOn ad

Accusations that the New York Times gave a price break to MoveOn.org for its ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus didn’t strike me as all that interesting. When it comes to newspaper advertising, everything is for sale, and the official rate card is often just a way to start negotiations.

But Times public editor Clark Hoyt says the Times made a mistake — that the price MoveOn paid ($65,000 as opposed to $142,000) was for a “standby” ad for which a specific day of publication could not be guaranteed. The MoveOn folks wanted their ad run on the Monday of the week that Petraeus was to testify on Capitol Hill, and they got their wish.

So how did it happen? Hoyt doesn’t quite say. But it sounds like an ad salesman wanted a commission.

Hoyt also doesn’t think the ad should have run at all. I disagree. As I’ve said before, the ad was an unfair attack on an honorable public official, although it’s hardly so offensive that it warranted breaking out the smelling salts.

The Times is a public trust, and its ad pages ought to be as open to political speech as possible, offensive or otherwise. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. gets it right when he tells Hoyt, “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue.”

Update: Looks like MoveOn just cost Rudy Giuliani $77,000. From a press release:

Now that the Times has revealed this mistake for the first time, and while we believe that the $142,083 figure is above the market rate paid by most organization, out of an abundance of caution we have decided to pay that rate for this ad. We will therefore wire the $77,083 difference to the Times tomorrow (Monday, September 24, 2007).

We call on Mayor Giuliani, who received exactly the same ad deal for the same price, to pay the corrected fee also.

Paying for the news

“Recovering Journalist” Mark Potts has a great post on New York Times executives’ decision to get rid of their pay service, TimesSelect.

I’ll confess that my glee over the demise of TimesSelect earlier this week was a bit knee-jerk. For consumers, there’s nothing not to like about free. As a blogger, I like being able to link to all Times content. And since the Times Web site is by far the largest news newspaper site, it may be uniquely suited to the advertiser-only model.

But the Times’ move still doesn’t address the question of how to pay for journalism, especially at news organizations that lack the Times’ cachet. (That is, everybody else.) Even Times executives may not have thought this through completely. Potts writes:

[C]ommitting good journalism is expensive, and so far, there’s no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump — and attendant advertising — can make that up. A blanket statement that “content is now and forever free,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided — and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying a revenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.

Typical news junkies may regularly visit five, 10 or more sites. Given that, I think the subscription model remains impractical. (And thus I still don’t lament the passing of TimesSelect.) But microtransactions of some sort — that is, an account from which some small amount of money, perhaps on the order of less than a penny, would be deducted for every article you read — loom on the horizon as a possible solution of how to pay for the news.

Bill Densmore, the founder of one such system known as Clickshare, has further thoughts here.