Matt Yglesias

Fallows on Newspapers

James Fallows has the following interesting observation on re-acquainting himself with the United States after years of mostly living in China:

Instead what I notice is the change within the papers I’d read before. The NYT, for all its travails, is a recognizable version of the publication I’d previously known. Personality, depth, world-view, tone. The poor Washington Post is not. Laying off — that is, buying out — so many reporters who knew so much about their topics has had a more profound effect than I would have guessed. (Locus classicus: Tom Ricks on defense.) And the resulting paper seem more obviously desperate to try anything that will draw attention in this new age.

To me, that was the real meaning of the unfortunate recent “Mouthpiece Theater” commotion that has accompanied my re-introduction to the Post. (And for which Chris Cillizza wrote a gracious apology.) Not the flap over the final “bitch” episode but the existence of the thing at all. Experimentation is great and necessary in journalism, always and especially now; mistakes are a natural price of that; and everyone in every field needs to make his or her work as entertaining and attractive as it can be. But trying to compete for attention on sheer yuks is a step toward the brink. “Real” entertainment will always be more entertaining — that’s how it got the name. Anyone hungry for more on this theme is invited to check out the whole chapter on the death-spiral of infotainment in Breaking the News.

That all seems about right to me. It’s also worth noting that though Ricks’ departure from the Post certainly counts as a major loss to that organization, that it’s not as if Ricks or his insights has vanished from the planet. The Washington Post Company owns Foreign Policy now which boasts an excellent website that includes a really good blog by Tom Ricks. He’s also a senior fellow at the influential Center for a New American Security think tank and still producing excellent, well-regarded, and commercially successful books. And thanks to the Internet, all kinds of people around the world who are interested in defense issues can read what Ricks has to say, which really wasn’t the case 15 years ago.

NYT to Contemplating $5/Month Charge

Michael Crowley gets excited:

Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.

One way the NYT can make online subscriptions far more appealing is by doing a better job of promoting the terrific new TimesReader 2.0, a simple but slick Adobe-based application that you install onto your computer in like two minutes. I’ve been meaning to plug this for a while, because it was only after I tried the incredibly user-friendly and print-like TimesReader that I could imagine surviving without the Times on paper.

A few points. First, I’m not sure how much “catching on” this idea could possibly do. A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world?

The other is simply that among the New York Times’ fans, a group in which I would include myself, I think there’s a tendency to overstate the extent to which the NYT is indispensable. Crowley says that it’s only thanks to the deployment of the new NYT reader software that he can begin to imagine life without a print Times. In the real world, though, the overwhelming majority of people are living life without a print Times and have been for years: “The New York Times had an average of 647,695 weekday home delivery subscribers as of the 26 weeks ended March 29, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data.” Now I definitely would pay $5 a month to read the NYT online. And I’m the kind of person who, did the internet not exist, would subscribe to the print NYT. But how many Yglesias’ and Crowleys are there in the world? The NYT’s online audience is now vastly larger than its print audience. How much of that is because the online version is free?

Note that BBC News runs the world’s second-best international news website and they don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge. That’s not the kind of firm you want to compete against.

When Is a Cartel Not a Cartel?

This seems mighty odd to me:

Allen Mutter reports that a number of CEO currently in San Diego for the Newspaper Association of America convention are holding a clandestine meeting to discuss, among other topics, whether and how to start charging readers to view articles and other content online. The presence of a lawyer in meant to ensure the conversation doesn’t stray into antitrust territory, whatever David Carr might wish. Still, one might think these executives — whose companies are, after all, competitors — might wish to keep any brilliant ideas about monetizing journalism to themselves. Chances are this confab will be less a workshop than a support group.

It seems to me that when your trade association is contemplating cartelization schemes that are so clearly illegal that you need to keep a lawyer on hand to ensure that you’re avoiding illegal cartelization schemes, you’re probably contemplating an illegal cartel. This would be like the Brownsville Boys having an attorney around to advise them how to make things look like suicide.

As Adam Smith wrote: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The Replaceable Parts of the Newspaper

Philip Kennicott’s argument that the problem with Watchmen-the-movie is that Watchmen-the-book is actually bad—”pretentious” and “the dialogue stinks”—is interesting, albeit wrongheaded. The movie may or may not be bad, I’ll tell you when I see it, but the book is definitely good.

That said, the really interesting thing about his argument, in the context of some recent discussions, is that it appears in The Washington Post written by a “Washington Post staff writer.” As newspapers vanish, there’s some stuff that it’s not clear we can replace. But I think we can be very confident that if the internet can provide anything, it’s arguments about the merits of comic books and their movie adaptations. And I think it’s somewhat strange to see news organizations holding on to this kind of professionally-produced content at the same time as they’re offering buyouts to people who do the kind of reporting that it’s not clear blogs can replace.

The George Will Scandal and the Decline of Great American Newspapers

I’ve heard a number of MSMers suggest to me in recent days that maybe bloggers should stop complaining about how The Washington Post publishes non-true statements about climate change as fact in its pages, and then has its editors and ombudsman claim that these false statements are true, because said complaining is contributing to the deplorable crisis in American newspapering. This strikes me as badly wrong. Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

Most of the newspapers in the United States don’t seem to me to have any real future. And this is going to pose some real problems. In particular, I’m not sure where intensive coverage of state and local government is going to come from in the brave new world and as Paul Starr points out that probably means more corruption. But interested consumers of national and international news will, I think, be extremely well-served. There will be a proliferation of niche media, and there will also be a handful of global English-language news media brands offering video, test, and audio coverage. I think it’s clear that one of them will be the BBC and that one of them will be based on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It strikes me as very plausible that another could be based on the Times and plausible, though somewhat less likely, that one could be based on the Post. But to reach that promised land you need to take care of these brands not flush them down the toilet to avoid angering conservatives or in pursuit of a cute conceit.