You can be the owner of a great newspaper like The New York Times, but this doesn’t mean that you have the talent and character to lead a newspaper that it’s an institution.
A newspaper institution that, at the end of the day, “belongs” to thousands of loyal readers.
So here there are more stupid comments from the capo di tutti capi.
The New York magazine had a brief cocktail encounter with “Pinch” Sulzberger and he made these lousy comments comparing print newspapers to the Titanic!
He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”
…
“We are trying to convert shipping companies to airplane companies,” said Sulzberger. “Same business: transporting people safely across long distances. Different cost structure, different way of doing business, but the same core business. There is still a very vibrant business in shipping. It’s just not taking masses of people across the Atlantic. It’s now taking families around the Seychelles, or something like that. There will still be passenger ships, but they’re not going to be in the same business. So print will still be here, I believe, decades from now. But will it be the driving force? No.”
As one reader of the pice said:
Airplanes did not surpass ships as the primary means of crossing the Atlantic until 1958. The TITANIC was not trying to set a speed record (it would have been physically impossible). Her construction was hardly shoddy. Airplanes in 1912 were little more than flimsy toys. The Atlantic was not crossed by commercial airplanes until the late 30s and then in hops. Lousy analogy!
Yes, a lousy analogy from a lousy publisher.
So with this kind of “friends”, the newsroom of The New York Times doesn’t need any enemy.
The enemy is inside.
It’s the owner!
(Picture by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Tags: "Pinch" Sulzberger, New York magazine, The New York Times, Titanic
