Offtopic: I am a European, and I like to read quality journalism. Which do you recommend, a subscruption to Washington Post or NYT?
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New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
181–190 of 360 posts
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#182That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there a…
There's just too many vital services that can't function with just ad financing. It's so obvious, that I have a slight hope we'll see new business models to accommodate for that. The problem is that I don't read a hundred articles a month by the NYT, I read maybe 5. And then 5 others on 30 different sites, each.
What I can imagine is a "digital pass" kinda thing that lets you access a massive amount of content for a reasonable monthly fee and divides it among members by what you use most or something. Flat-rate pricing is the way to go on the internet, it is for premium video streaming (Netflix), for music (Spotify) and games will probably follow soon (it seems Nintendo is switching the Virtual Console to being part of their subscription model, for example). I could see it for premium newspapers. It fixes this paralyzing decision of which subscription you pay for.
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#183The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off…
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Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting. It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor: https://www.nytime…
I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet. I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article. Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another…
I think the issue is that 40 years seems to be extrapolated from an average, but the distribution of human lifespans (especially in pre-modern times) is bi-modal so the average doesn't tell you much about how long they lived conditioned on reaching adulthood. I found mostly questionable-looking paleo-diet related results as well, but to their credit the chain of citations led back to peer-reviewed research such as this:
> we see that on average 57 percent, 64 percent, and 67 percent of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers, forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers and 61 percent of forager-horticulturalists reach age 45. The acculturated hunter-gatherers show lower young adult mortality rates, with 79 percent surviving to age 45, conditional on reaching age 15.
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/gurvenlab/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.ed...
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in the past the NYT had earned their reputation as a trustworthy source, but they're certainly eroding that reputation at a blistering pace. They might survive as a partisan publisher, plenty do, but I always go into NYT articles expecting bias in reporting. It's not just the politics, either. I ran across this article from just a couple of days ago and couldn't believe it got past an editor: https://www.nytime…
I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet. I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article. Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another…
> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.
You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#186That’s just insane. This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry. NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever. If NYT is the best at this and can only turn 24M a quarter, almost everyone else must be absolutely bleeding. This would confirm most of the newspapers out there a…
Newspapers were never valued for their ability of generating profits, but more as tools that can shape or sway the public opinion.
Having "few" and "consolidated" reporting entities basically reflects the status-quo pre-internet, where at a local/national level you would have a handful of newspapers (or TV channels), each having often a fairly evident slant or clearly lobbying for a particular political party or social group.
But while we shouldn't view the past in an excessively positive way, it's hard to consider an improvement what we are moving towards, a situation where there are far and far more numerous and uncontrolled sources of infomation, amplified by social media.
At least (most) traditional newspapers always had the obligation of fact-checking, a burden that a spurious blog or forum post or twitter message doesn't have...
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#187The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think the most recent Sarah Jeong controversy and virtually all reporting on migration, feminism, campus politics etc shows this. Mind you this is from a European perspective where I see almost all reporting about politics here as copying off…
> The greatest marketing trick the NYT has ever pulled off is presenting themselves as the last bastion of objectivity in the trump era.
Considering most of the nation doesn't trust the NYT, not sure it was much of a trick. People trust foxnews more than the NYT. Think about that.
The real trick that the NYT ( along with CNN, MSNBC, etc ) pulled was forcing google, youtube, facebook and much of social media to give it an unfair privileged position to increase network traffic. They got a short term boost but it wasn't as significant as they'd hoped and it certainly won't last. Already, the subscriber growth has declined along with overall traffic.
Keep in mind that if we get a recession, the first thing the new subs will cut is the NYT subscription. I'm speaking from experience here. Also, as people get older and have more experience reading the NYT, their mistrust of NYT increases. Not a good sign for a trust based product.
And their activities ( hirings, stories and agenda pushing ) isn't helping.
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is 100M$ a year profit, not revenue but profit, a low amount for a newspaper to make? that seems to me like a fair amount to be at the top. If other newspapers make a tenth of the profit, that should still be an acceptable market? no? Edit: with 3700 employes (per Wikipedia) that's put their profit to be about 27000$ per employee. That's 4 times as much as walmart. From what I can tell it's also more then IBM and pro…
The tech bubble really skewed the perception field of many people.
> tech bubble
I think OP misread the quarterly figure as an annual one. “Tech bubble” usually applies to companies with much less than $100 million of profits.
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your point about the Paleo diet. I just Googled, and apparently the "ignore how infant mortality affects life expectancy" is a talking point of pro-Paleo websites. This is a good point (although it seems to ignore the high mortality rate of women during childbirth), but seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the article. Ignoring that, it seemed a reasonably well thought-out counterpoint to another…
> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects. You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.
>> There have been no studies of large groups of people who have followed the currently popular versions of the Paleo diet for decades to assess their long-term health effects.
> You could say similar things about climate change. The science is, and always will be, out. That's the nature of science.
This is a false equivalency.
Science requires experiments to support or refute hypotheses. The fact that new experiments may cause us to revisit a theory does not mean that one can assert any arbitrary theory to be correct.
Re: New York Times Co. Reports $24M Profit, Thanks to Digital Subscribers
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
even their incoherent stance on racism as illustrated in the Sarah Jeong debacle? I could live with a left bias but not their blatant hypocrisy.
Weaponizing old, out-of-context tweets is just the new alt-right playbook. James Gunn is the other obvious example. Yes, these people posted things that were bad ideas. They also apologised, made it clear they were not serious about what was said, and moved past it. To claim it makes their entire coverage of racism incoherent is... misleading at best. Imitating the masses of people trolling you as a joke may be a bad…
> Weaponizing old, out-of-context tweets is just the new alt-right playbook
No, it was the cultural mainstream that made it acceptable to fire people over communication mistakes. See the "Just kidding, I'm white" tweet[1], Tim Hunt getting fired by Twitter before even getting off his plane[2], or in tech: Donglegate, where people on both sides were fired.
NYT should totally hire Sarah Jeong, but as a leftie, I have to agree with the "alt-right" that the double standard is ridiculous. The Verge sums it up pretty well[3]: Nobody should attack our journalists for their tweets, with the implication that firing everyone else was a great idea.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/tim-hunt-for...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17644878/the-verge-new-yor...