WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

This is an interesting picture by Jin Lee for Bloomberg News:

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. chairman and publisher of The New York Times Co., departs the company’s shareholders meeting at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 … using a back exit door.

Just in case.

New York Times Co. shareholders, led by Morgan Stanley, withheld 42 percent of their votes from directors to protest the Sulzberger family’s control over the company.

Five years ago, The New York Times stock was $51.88 (July 5, 2002).

This Friday, the same shares were traded at $18.87.

Not the best financial performance for a first-class newspaper.

The Sulzberger family has a problem.

They need money.

But Wall Street is not listening.

The stock is so cheap that almost any rival could buy all the available shares for next to nothing.

You don’t need to be a Google to buy all this stock.

The problem and the solution here is, again, the family.

They belong to the same company.

The last time that I visited them, they were in the same building.

Yesterday they had the same front page picture.

As you know, the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post exchange their front pages every night …

They belong to different companies and they are in different cities.

In Vancouver, these two papers are together, but, as you can see, they are two separate worlds.

Another example of lack of communication inside, yes, communication companies!

“Trying to assess the true importance of the Internet now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage Miles,” said The New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.

Sorry, but Yahoo!, MySpace, Google, Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, for example, are quite mature developments and the slow response of many traditional media publishers shows that they are not the Wright brothers of the Internet.

Today, The New York Times stock is lower than ever.

Around $18 right now.

Going down again and again after Morgan Stanley sold its nearly 10.4 million shares in the newspaper.

The newsroom is producing a first-class product, but the business management is doing a third-class job.

If you are a fan of Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and economics professor at Princeton University, here is his new blog.

You know the big news:

In a surprisingly strong move, the Federal Reserve unanimously voted to cut its overnight interest rate target by a half percentage point to 4.75% Tuesday, citing turmoil in financial markets as a threat to economic growth.

And here you have how a few U.S. newspapers presented the news.

The most striking thing for me is that only a few papers did something dramatic.

That said, some of them did it very well with strong graphics and, more important, with what’s next, why, and what it means to you stories.

Well done! And shame to the 99% that were, as usual, sleeping.

This quality popular tabloid from California has excellent poster front pages.

And the headlines are quite good.

The Wall Street Journal, surprise!, goes soft and calm with a sober chart that doesn’t explain too much.

The Record’s graphic approach was very different and asked an excellent question: Are there more cuts to come?

The same graphic idea but with a full package of what’s next journalism.

Brilliant!

A less dramatic presentation but a meaningful one from North Carolina.

The New York Times did a “sushi graphic” that works and headlines for interesting analysis pieces.

The European newspapers couldn’t elaborate too much but at least the Financial Times in Germany did a good job with this well-planned in advance graphic panel that only needed to add the percent of the final cut.

The first decision will have this headline:

WSJ Stops Charging for Access to Its Web Site.

Any doubt?

No.

So, the Financial Times is next.

As Jeff Jarvis says in a terrific post:

It’s the relationship that is valuable.

It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution.

That is the essential media moral of the internet story.

It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it.

That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

Jeff also tells this great story:

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in.

In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

(Illustration by Vince Natale/NYT)

An amazing slideshow about pollution in China with pictures by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times.

How can a newspaper with content like this have such bad management?

Another example of how the management of The New York Times was wrong.

Read today’s internal memo trying to explain the shift on TimesSelect:

Our TimesSelect experience has provided us with many valuable lessons that have helped us turn NYTimes.com into an even more informative, community-oriented, interactive and entertaining site.

We welcome all online readers to enjoy the popular and powerful voices that have defined Times commentary – Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof.

And we invite them to become acquainted with our exclusive online journalism – columns by Stanley Fish, Maira Kalman, Dick Cavett and Judith Warner; the Opinionator blog; and guest forums by scientists, musicians and soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq.

All this will now reach a broader audience in the United States and around the world.

We want to thank everyone who has contributed to TimesSelect.

You should be very proud of what you accomplished, creating one of the Web’s outstanding opinion forums.

Yesterday marked the 156th anniversary of the first issue of The New York Times.

Our long, distinguished history is rooted in a commitment to innovation, experimentation and constant change.

All three themes were plainly evident in the skillful execution of TimesSelect; they will be on full display as NYTimes.com becomes entirely open.

Sincerely,

Vivian Schiller, Andy Rosenthal and Jonathan Landman

TimesSelect was launched in September 2005 and, two years later, had approximately 787,400 active subscribers.

Approximately 471,200 received TimesSelect free of charge as a benefit of their home-delivery subscriptions, while 227,000 paid for online access and another 89,200 received it for free on college campuses through TimesSelect University.

Forbes magazine is trying to sell its building in Manhattan for $140 million.

The New York Times not only sold the old headquarters in Times Square for $525 million, but also its former printing plant for $11.5 million.

Is this a trend?

Yes.

Sell all your non-core business assets.

Including printing presses.

And invest all this money in the digital transition.

As soon as possible.

Period.

Clark Hoyt, the new public editor of The New York Times, is right:

The New York Times has been very soft covering the Sulzberger family, and very agressive covering the Bancrofts.

The lead of his great column:

HERE’S a story I’d like to read — and I’ll bet you would too.

One of America’s leading companies, a world-famous brand, has hit a rough patch.

Its revenues and profits are declining, its debt rating has been downgraded, and a leading Wall Street house has advised investors to dump their shares.

With sales of its core product falling, the company is raising the price and investing heavily in new technology that is slow to pay off.

A major outside shareholder has been agitating to end the stock structure that has allowed one storied and powerful family to run the company for four generations. Another family in the same troubled industry appears ready to throw in the towel, will this family be able to stick together and find new success?

This is dramatic and important stuff.

And it’s the kind of story you often read on the front page or the Sunday Business front of The New York Times.

But you haven’t read this one in full, sweeping style because the company is The New York Times, and the family is the close-knit and extraordinarily private Ochs-Sulzbergers, descendants of Adolph Ochs, who came up from Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1896, bought the failing New-York Times and put it on the path to greatness.

Hoyt is a former Knight-Ridder editor.

I met him several times in the past and I’m sure he is going to be a good public editor.

Newspaper ombudsmen are always controversial figures.

Clark Hoyt is going to be one of the most controversial ones.