Knight-Bagehot
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I
certainly use to think of myself as an old hand when it comes to
America. American wife, kids with US passports, two of them
at college here. I lived in New York for a while in the 80s and
have been coming back regularly ever since.
I also thought I knew all the nuances – and the jokes – about
the whole British English/American English thing. We burgle
whereas, for some reason which no doubt made sense at the
time, you burglarize. You lead the world in the development of
the internet, we on the other hand can actually pronounce it.
Yes there are two Ts, ladies and gentlemen, and one of them
falls in the middle – it’s not ‘innernet’, with that lamentable
alveolar nasal, it’s the internet.
Nor will you catch me out with your charmingly idiosyncratic
use of the word ‘quite’. I know that here ‘quite good’ means
well, really quite good, whereas back in Merrie Olde England, it
means frankly pitiful. Except when it means the opposite.
But I have been completely foxed by the meaning of the word
to table. Back home, to ‘table’ something means to put it on the
table, in other words to propose it. I’ve only just discovered
that here it means to take something off the table – and I’m
beginning to wonder whether any of the grand plans I’ve
proposed at The Times are in fact being implemented or
whether what I’ve actually asked my colleagues to do is to
throw them into what you call the trash. No wonder they were
nodding so enthusiastically.
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I’ve also discovered the new verb ‘to reach out to’. There’s so
much reaching out at The Times that I sometimes wonder if
anything else ever happens there. To an English ear, ‘reaching
out’ has a Bridge Over Troubled Water quality to it, it sounds
like an act of heart-felt charity, you know comforting the
widow and orphan, or trying to talk Arthur off the ledge. But
I’ve finally discovered that in 2013 in New York City ‘to reach
out to’ someone essentially means to send them an email.
* * *
It’s a real privilege to join you to celebrate the success of the
Knight-Bagehot Fellowship. Business has been one of the few
areas of journalism where we’ve seen fresh investment and
large-scale new job opportunities over the past decade. But
business and finance journalism have still been subject to
many of the other pressures which are playing on the
profession, in particular the arrival of on-all-the-time media
and everything that goes with it – continuous news cycles, ever
more platforms to service, a constant stream of new
competitors, the compression of thinking time and reporting
time.
That last point is an important one. With a few honourable
exceptions – some of my Times colleagues and of course Gillian
Tett, who first suggested I give this speech this evening, are
notable examples – too many of the major events and
revelations of the past six tumultuous years have caught the
world’s business journalists by surprise.
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We need more and better enterprise journalism in business,
finance and economics, as well as great beat reporting. We
need more and deeper analysis and comment.
The Knight-Bagehot Fellowship makes a significant
contribution to all of these. I want to congratulate its board, its
alumni and its many supporters for everything they do to raise
the bar.
What we do is valuable
I’m going to spend a few minutes this evening talking about
how we think about the future of journalism at The Times, and
I’m going to frame my remarks with a few propositions. The
first couldn’t be simpler. It is that what we and other serious
news organisations do is valuable and will continue to be
valued by discerning consumers irrespective of changes in
technology and media consumption.
For at least a decade this proposition has been under assault.
People just don’t value high quality journalism enough to be
prepared to pay for it, it was often said, so there’s no point
trying to charge for it on the web.
Or there’s a cohort effect. Older people do value it, but the
young do not and, as the first die off and are replaced by the
second, the market for quality journalism will inevitably
collapse.
Or maybe the fact that digital makes it so easy for anyone to
make and distribute content means that anyone can and will
become a journalist and the last handful of professional
reporters will end up barricaded inside the last newsroom, like
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the cast of The Walking Dead, surrounded by a swarming mass
of citizen journalists armed with GoPros and iPhones.
Now it’s true that quality journalism cannot rely on as much
passing trade as it used to. Take international news on TV.
When there were only three US broadcast networks, little or no
cable competition and no internet, the news divisions could
fight for audience share, turn a decent profit and still support a
significant international newsgathering operation and
broadcast a fair amount of international news. I ran the BBC
news operation for much of the Tiananmen Square crisis and
seeing the networks arrive in Beijing was like watching a series
of US carrier groups sailing into port.
Competition and fragmentation changed that. It meant a
tougher fight for audiences, tougher economics and an
understandable concentration on a more popular domestic and
human-interest driven agenda. Investment in foreign bureaux
declined dramatically – as it did at many newspapers across
America and Europe.
But we’re talking here at news aimed at mass audiences –
audiences who were already known twenty-five and fifty years
ago to prefer home news over international. The readers of
The New York Times, of The Wall Street Journal or the FT, have
always expected, indeed demanded high quality foreign
coverage. There’s no reason to believe that that appetite is on
the wane.
For me, the fact that The Times has thirty bureaux outside of
the U.S. isn’t a handicap, it’s a point of distinction and a
valuable competitive advantage for the kind of readers we
want to attract, as well as being an essential part of the mission
of the Times.
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When The Times announced plans to launch a pay model in
2011, members of the no-one-will-pay-for-quality-journalism
school predicted that it would fail completely or only attract a
handful of subscribers. We announced last week that we
currently have over 725,000 digital-only subscribers, in
addition to our more than a million print-and-digital
subscribers.
In fact, The New York Times has more paying customers today
than at any previous point in its history – as well as the tens of
millions of people who continue to access some of our
journalism on the web and mobile for free every month. We
certainly face challenges, but lack of underlying consumer
demand is not one of them.
So how about that age-related cohort effect? For anyone who
enjoys a little light cultural pessimism, it’s a tempting notion –
a generation of serious readers giving way to one which is
more interested in celebrity and cat videos than macroeconomics. But the evidence doesn’t support it.
If you said that relatively few millennials read The New York
Times, you’d be perfectly right, and I’m sure the same is true of
The Economist and The Guardian and Le Monde, but that was
always the case. And we are not seeing a significant year-onyear increase in the age either of print or digital subscribers.
In fact digital is bringing the average age down.
And we should be careful about separating the two in our
minds too much. Three quarters of our print subscribers
authenticate for digital usage and they use print and digital
seamlessly depending on convenience and time of day – print
perhaps first thing in the morning, then a smart-phone on the
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way into work, then a desktop or lap-top, with the tablet or the
paper playing a bigger role in the evening and at the weekend.
People often assume that we’re living through a one-way
transition and that print will ultimately and inevitably fade
away for all papers and magazines. They may be right, but
they may not. I sometimes wonder whether it’s not what you
could call the traditional desktop which is currently most at
risk of being eclipsed by the phenomenal tilt towards mobile.
That strong movement towards mobile certainly does raise
questions for serious journalism. How do we get news of
breadth and depth to consumers more and more of whose
consumption is going to be on small screens and in relatively
short sessions? It shouldn’t be impossible. A couple of
thousand years ago, human beings created the codex, the small
bound book with cut pages, precisely because it was more
convenient to carry around and read than large scrolls. No one
would suggest that the invention of the book made serious
content harder to access. But the radical shift to mobile, and
especially to smart phone, does mean profound challenges in
design and user experience.
Let me turn to the third threat – that professional journalism
faces extinction because the people who used to be our readers
and viewers will become our competitors. In my view, this
view also falls victim to the substitution fallacy, the view that
one kind of media inevitably gives way to another, whereas our
experience is that media typically end up complementing each
other, radio and the movies co-existing with TV, DVD, on
demand viewing and so on.
The democratisation of the means of production and
distribution of journalism and other content is a good thing
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and it challenges the profession in many ways. Newer
entrants, whether specialists like Business Insider and Politico
or broader like Huff Po and Buzzfeed, compete with fresh
content perspectives and technical innovations, sometimes
irritate us intensely by keying off our material, but nudge us
also to our own experiments and breakthroughs, as well as
broadening the diversity and choice available to the public.
Citizen-reporting and other kinds of user generated content
are also making a material difference to the way the world
reports itself to itself.
But it’s a false move in the chess game to conclude that we’re
hurtling towards a future in which the skills and judgement of
professional reporters and editors will no longer be needed.
I happened to be in The Times newsroom when the Boston
bombing story broke earlier this year. Over the next few days,
more often than not the next development in the story was
first flashed, not by any of the old or new journalistic
providers, but by Twitter.
And yet the problem with Twitter is you don’t just get the
news, you get everything else as well: uncorroborated but
potentially precious eye-witness testimony and citizen
journalism, but also rumour, speculation, disinformation,
propaganda, lies and general nuttiness.
The idea that the world’s professional journalists could easily
be replaced by a kind of Wikipedia of news, reported and
curated by a global army of publicly-spirited amateurs is a
rather noble one. But quite apart from issues of political and
cultural bias, it turns out that what we face in a major
unfolding hard news story is a vast, roiling sea of actuality with
both truth and narrative often fiendishly hard to make out.
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Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet and members of the masthead
were in the newsroom pretty much round the clock that week,
not to second-guess the mechanics of the coverage but because
in the age of Twitter, classic editorial standards – about
sources and fact-checking and balance and only going with
something when you’re sure – really matter.
The same is true – whatever you think of the underlying ethical
and legal questions – about the way in which serious news
providers like The Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post
and others, have worked on stories originating from Wikileaks
and Edward Snowden, investigating, substantiating,
contextualising and assessing what it is in the public interest to
publish and what it is not.
We live in a time when great professional reporting and editing
skills and great journalistic values aren’t obsolescent, they’re
more important than ever.
We need multiple revenue streams
My second proposition this evening is that in the future we are
going to need multiple, sustainable revenue streams to support
serious journalism.
Historically most owners saw newspapers and news
broadcasts commercially as advertising platforms. The news
itself might represent a civic good, but the best way of paying
for it was by selling the attention of its consumers to
advertisers. In the case of newspapers, this view typically
implied a low cover price and a strategy of maximising
distribution. The business was inevitably cyclical but the
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margins of print advertising could be so high – 90% in the case
of The Times even today – that that didn’t matter too much.
Advertising remains really important for the Times. We have a
new head of advertising, Meredith Kopit Levien, and a new
determination to innovate in and develop our advertising
business – and in particular to grow digital advertising.
But we can never recapture the supply scarcity – and pricing
power in advertising – which newspapers once enjoyed. We
need circulation, now more than half the Times’ total revenue,
and other significant sources of revenue, if we want to grow.
In 2011, as you heard, we launched our digital pay model. The
first plank of our new strategy is to develop additional pay
offerings aimed at those who tell us they would certainly pay
us something for Times journalism but less than the $200 or so
which is our current lowest digital subscription – though we
also intend to create enhanced offerings for those who tell us
they would pay us more than the current most expensive
subscription if we offered them the right additional features
and services. We want, if you can bear the jargon, to exploit
more of the demand curve.
But we want to do it not just with cut-down or pumped-up
versions of our current offering but with fresh expressions of
our journalism that our newsroom and the rest of the company
can really believe in, with their own integrity and appeal.
One of the new ideas is a project with the working title of Need
2 Know. A mobile first product, it’s intended to offer users the
perfect briefing not just on the news that’s already happened
but on the stories up ahead that our editors already have their
eye on, and to do it with its own voice. If you’ve caught the
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‘New York Today’ feature in the Metro section of our website,
you’ll have an idea of what that voice could be.
We’re also at work on a set of other offerings, ranging from
opinion, one of the Times’ greatest strengths, to dining.
The ability to exploit the same underlying intellectual property
through multiple formats and time-windows is what made it
possible for Hollywood to keep movies profitable, despite their
colossal initial cost and despite the fragmentation of
entertainment first by TV and subsequently by digital. News is
too time-sensitive for many windows through time, but the
development of multiple different expressions of our
journalism, optimised for particular audiences and use-cases,
aims to achieve the same effect.
But we want to gather those different expressions under one
core brand and one integrated journalistic operation on all
platforms and in all territories.
That’s why we decided this year to sell the Boston Globe. It’s a
great newspaper with its own proud tradition, but a different
brand, a different consumer proposition and a different
business model.
And it’s why a few weeks ago we renamed the International
Herald Tribune the International New York Times. For the first
time, not just the physical newspapers but every version of our
website and of our apps will be under the same brand.
Thirty years after The Times’ move to become a national
newspaper, we want to explore what the international
opportunity could be for us in terms of new subscribers and
new advertising revenue We also want to explore what a fully
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joined-up advertising sales force can achieve around the world
with The New York Times brand and the interesting and
valuable readers we attract both in digital and in print.
And we’re developing other new revenues streams as well:
o video, which from multimedia projects like the recent
Game of Shark & Minnow from the South China Sea to
newsfeeds to documentaries to features, offers the chance
of deeper and rich audience involvement, as well as
access to fresh advertising budgets;
o conferences, where we are bringing The Times and IHT
conference businesses together and significantly scaling
them;
o smart games, building out from our crossword franchise
and its remarkable success as an independent digital
subscription play;
o and e-commerce.
The revolution is only just getting started
The third and last proposition I want to leave with tonight is
that the revolution is only just getting started.
Given the intensity of change we’ve seen in journalism over the
past twenty years, and given some of the casualties, it’s easy to
see why people might want to convince themselves that
sometime soon the pace must slacken and a new steady state
begin to emerge.
That in business journalism, say, the market will shake out, the
barriers to entryrise, some of the players consolidate and that
a core of papers and channels and websites and apps will
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remain made up of a mixture of old-stagers and newcomers,
and that finally everyone can relax.
One can’t rule anything out, but honestly I doubt it. Everything
we know about digital and in particular about both private and
professional consumption of digital suggests that actually we
should expect the rate of change to accelerate.
For incumbents everywhere that means that we have to do two
things at once: to develop new services, revenue streams and
ways of working at the same pace as digital insurgents, but also
to maintain the commitment to seriousness and quality which
has always marked us out and which remains our mission,
indeed the only compelling argument for our existence.
There are plenty of digital prognosticators out there that say
that this twin task is impossible, that either we will end up
lowering our standards or inevitably fall behind in the digital
race.
Let me finish by saying that we intend to prove them wrong
and, at the New York Times Company, I believe we have the
energy, the talent and the commitment to do just that. Thank
you.
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