JACK SHAFER: The News Business Really Is Cratering.
The ongoing flood obviously won’t sweep all journalism away. But except for a few big players, will it become more of a cottage industry than an economic and cultural force? If great cities like Los Angeles, with its many prosperous, educated and engaged citizens, can’t support a decent daily newspaper, what hope is there for the rest of the country? Are we belatedly learning that the great journalism empires — the Times-Mirror chain, Knight Ridder, Gannett, Scripps-Howard, Tribune, McClatchy, Advance Publications, Hearst, Freedom Communications and the rest — weren’t journalism empires as much as they were advertising colossuses, and that they became doomed when they lost status as the best advertising vehicle?
Journalism will survive, of course, even if the business falters as the advertising subsidy that made it viable erodes. Publications for readers who depend on market-moving news like you find in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and other business titles will endure. So will the aforementioned New York Times, which provides news that moves political markets and has established itself as a national voice worth paying for.
That isn’t what Shafer wrote in 2018 about the Gray Lady: Sell the New York Times. Now. And other unsolicited advice for A.G. Sulzberger:
The best thing A.G. has going for him is that he isn’t Arthur Jr., who inspired more sniggers than respect during his years as Times publisher. According to the various profiles written about him, Arthur Jr. was a well-meaning but goofy Star Trek fan, completely over his head in the job. An unsteady manager, he indelicately sacked two executive editors (Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), though admittedly in crises not completely of his making. One unnamed critic told Times chroniclers Alex S. Jones and Susan E. Tifft that Arthur Jr. needed to “go back in the oven and bake a little longer.” An anonymous Times Company executive dismissed him as no more than a business “figurehead” in a 2005 New Yorker Auletta feature. Mark Bowden shared more abuse in Vanity Fair in 2009, writing, “Even the mid-level talent around Arthur does not regard him as a peer, much less a suitable leader.” Behind his back, staffers ridiculed Arthur Jr. for instituting corporate sensitivity seminars at the paper. “I’ve been hugged by people I don’t even want to shake hands with,” one repulsed Times editor told the late Marjorie Williams for a 1994 Vanity Fair story. (Arthur Jr. does have his champions, though. See this recent Daniel Okrent piece for the counterpoint.)
As I wrote at the time, “only a fellow Democrat could describe Pinch Sulzberger as ‘well-meaning’” after his myriad racialist, anti-American, and doomsday statements made during his decades with the paper. And that was before the Times’ identity politics crackup in 2020.
Can the Times weather that storm? Well, certainly the brand name will likely exist in perpetuity, but like most journalistic outposts in 2024, the end product is far weaker than what it was in decades past, as former NYT editor James Bennet admitted at the end of last year.