FROM SAIL TO STEAM IN THE NEWSROOM: “The newspaper industry has been in the grip of a multi-year perturbation that has few parallels to other industry-wide rapid evolutions. In the past I have compared it to the years in which the carriages pulled by horses gave way to motor cars, but that is not the best analogy as one industry died as another rose. The better analogy for newspapers is the transition from sail to steam among ships, especially navies.”

“Pinch” Sulzberger agrees:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.

I hope that he’s able to pull it off, though his record to date does not inspire confidence.