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Abstract Speakers
MARGARET
WEIGEL, Comparative Media Studies (CMS): Rich, you mentioned
offering subscriptions to the print version on your website.
Has general circulation gone up? You also said the website isn’t
generating revenue, so how is it being paid for? MEISLIN:
We’re generating revenues – we’re just generating
more expenses. WEIGEL:
How is it paid for? MEISLIN:
Well, it is a division of The New York Times Company, which
is covering the difference between the revenues and expenses
from its considerable profits. This is considered an investment
in The New York Times’ future, and they’ve
quite literally put their money where there mouth is. As for your first question, New York Times subscribers are increasing, for which we are thankful. A lot of other major newspapers in the U.S. have suffered small-to-moderate circulation losses over the last couple of years. Meanwhile, our website, which puts up the unique barrier of having all users register before they can use it, has approached or exceeded 14 million users in the five years since we’ve been in existence. That’s almost double over last year. QUESTION:
Rich, I just wonder why you have chosen not to charge for access
to your website? I know The Wall Street Journal has done
that quite successfully. Why don’t you do that at The
New York Times? Also, do you see other revenue models for
news on the web other than advertising? MEISLIN:
Fortunately, my involvement in the business side is reasonably
minimal. But I do know at least part of the answer to your question.
We experimented briefly with charging international customers
only. The philosophical basis of that was that if you live in
a place where The New York Times does not reach you,
then a subscription would be of as much value to you as to a
home delivery subscriber. Fewer than 10,000 people believed
that philosophy. In the week that we stopped charging for access,
we got more than 10,000 online subscriptions. International
subscribers are now 15 percent of our audience. Ultimately,
you have to decide whether charging brings the audience level
down to where your advertising base is too small to support
you. We will never be Yahoo; we are not going to reach
audiences of that magnitude. In a way, The New York Times is a niche product because there is no mass audience for the kind of information
it provides. On the other hand, it has an extremely desirable
audience for advertisers, so we get considerably higher advertising
revenues per thousand views than a site such as Yahoo. Somehow or other, that math has to be made to work.
Are there other ways to make money? Yes, we hope there are. We are looking at special services on our site for which people are willing to pay. People are already paying for our archive services, and that’s not a small amount of money. We are looking for alternatives, but it’s not easy to find them. There’s nobody out there who’s come up with the magic bullet, as anybody running a news site will tell you, other than having a rich corporate parent. DAVID
THORBURN, Communications Forum director: One theme both
of you have touched on has to do with what I’ll call the
myth of a new technology displacing or entirely replacing an
older one. You both described something more complicated: the
emergence of hybrid formats that combine old and new technologies.
One simple but also powerful instance of this partnership between
the achievements of print technology and cyberspace is visible
in the book reviews in the Times on the Web. When you
read a review of a current novel in the Cyber Times,
you have access to all previous Times reviews of that
author and often such ancillary matter as recordings of the
writer's voice from public readings or Times articles
by or about your chosen author. A single review, then, may ramify
widely and deeply. MEISLIN:
One example is how NBC does a particularly deft job of promoting
people from the television to the web. In our case, newspapers
don’t push traffic to the web the instantaneous way television
does. But, we do have writers who are stars in their fields,
and the ability to collect information over time. You mentioned
one of those collections, the book review collection that is
on the web. We plan on doing the same thing with our recipes
and other information collections. You’ll be seeing that
in the months ahead. JOHNSON:
From a personal perspective, I spend a lot of time at home
watching television and surfing the web at the same time. I
have a wireless network in the apartment, and I’ll be
sitting there watching television with my wife and we’ll
say, “What was that?” and I’ll pop open my
laptop and look it up. In my office, I am often taking in simultaneous
streams of information on the same subject. You can keep the
television stream going in the background and still read intently
on your computer screen. The
multiprocessing idea that was more of a metaphor 10 years ago
about our post-modern, schizophrenic state is really becoming
true in terms of people doing this. I don’t think this
has been fully recognized in terms of how the media deal with
it. MTV has been out front of this doing relatively inane things,
but recognizing nonetheless that their viewers are online and
watching television at the same time. ANITA
CHAN, CMS: I really liked your comment about the relationship
between Slashdot and older forms of media: that it is
a sort of a parasitic relationship. I did a project on Slashdot
and spoke with the two editors of the site, and they really
want to distinguish their site as not being a news site. “We
generate commentary, we collectivize this community, but reporting
is not our shtick.” What are the ways traditional media
are reacting to or incorporating this community-based model
of forums and conversations? JOHNSON:
Once you start getting into the question of the community actually
creating the content rather than just responding to content,
I think there’s a big gap between traditional news journalism
and what we call service journalism. Traditional news journalism
is going down to Tallahassee or going to the Supreme Court and
reporting on what’s going on. Well, web-based communities
don’t do a very good job of that and The New York Times
will always do a better job of it, and there will always be
a need for that. There
is a lot of room for the growth of community-based content in
service journalism – where the information is not so much
breaking news, but rather information about some product. Under
this service model, you can lean on large distributed bodies
of people who are not on your payroll to provide useful information,
often more useful information than that provided by official
reviewers. MEISLIN:
That’s one aspect of it, the creation of communities.
Another is the value of communities in providing a secondary
filter for information. We present The New York Times
every day, and different people read it in different ways. One
of the things I’ve wanted to do is to recruit people who
are interesting – who think in interesting ways –
and track their movements around the site and then tell people
this is how so-and-so read The New York Times on the
Web this morning. I would love to have someone I trust pre-read
The New York Times for me every morning because there’s
too damn much information every day. That’s something we can do on the web that the newspaper can’t possibly do because it has to happen in real time to have any value. I am totally open to that kind of stuff, it’s terrific. When the web first started, people said newspapers are dead because readers will go to the direct source of the news. But no one wants to spend that much time gathering information every day. There is a value to people who can filter information for you, and until free communities get as good at that as the skilled and well-paid editors of The New York Times, they’re not going to replace The Times. REGAN:
Interactivity is one of the buzzwords around technology, but
it doesn’t take place between writers and their audience.
Some sites provide e-mail addresses for their reporters, some
don’t. Do you think that in the future being a journalist
will mean constant interaction with the people who read your
material, and is that a good or bad thing? Or, will the firewall
that now exists continue to be left up? MEISLIN:
We talk about this all the time. The policy is that our writers
can make their e-mail addresses public voluntarily. Those people
suffer the torments of e-mail hell because every activist group
in the world sends them tons of Spam every day. I’m on
the list. I get literally 300 pieces of email on an average
day, of which one-third is garbage that results from me being
on that list, but I think it is important for me to be there. On
the other hand, if you are a reporter and you have a life and
a hard job and you think your responsibility is to do that job,
then you might not give out your e-mail address. I can understand
that. If we could control it so that if you made your e-mail
address public and the bulk of what you get is valuable communication,
then most people would be for it, but I don’t think the
technology has gotten to that point. JOHNSON: Well, we don’t put it into the contract, but we positively evaluate a writer’s willingness to participate in the follow-up discussions in what we call The Loop, the community area at Feed. DAVID
SPITZ, CMS: Steve, can you elaborate on why this decentered
news model we’re talking about is a powerful thing and
why, in your opinion, it works best in the service arena? JOHNSON:
Well, when I say it works best, I mean it’s a more economical
way to generate quality information. Another side of it is that
there’s so much more breadth. If you open up your discussion
forums and you have a million people coming to your site and
you say, “Talk about whatever you want related to home
electronics,” they will cover almost everything. This
is the philosophy of open-source software development –
it’s no accident it shows up at Slashdot. If you
have enough people looking at a problem they don’t all
have to be geniuses, they just have to be pretty smart, and
collectively their intelligence will be much greater than that
of a traditionally engineered project run by a small team. SPITZ:
Powerful strikes me as a term with political resonance. JOHNSON:
The politics of it is fascinating. This is what my new book
is about, so I’ve been wrestling with this a lot. From
one angle, you can say this is kind of a grassroots struggle;
it looks like traditional lefty politics, very much on the ground. But, on the other hand, it’s a distributed system and
looks a little bit like the libertarian idea of how ideal markets
work. Apparently,
some of the anti-WTO, Seattle-kind-of protestors have started
talking about a sort of decentralized political organization
as a way to build a movement and avoid the problems that the
Left has had in the past with too much centralization. We’re
just at the beginning of thinking about these things, but it
will be interesting to see where they lead. SPITZ:
Rich, it strikes me that the most important thing at the
newspaper is its talent. So, how do you keep the top talent
writing for the digital version, or do they all want to fly
to the newspaper as soon as they can? MEISLIN: We put the news operation for the website in The New York Times newsroom and hired people as New York Times reporters. They are subcontracted to us and we are their only clients, but they are on the payroll of The New York Times and are hired to the standards of a New York Times reporter. MARY
HOPPER, CMS: Is there a difference in the perception of
the reporters when their work appears in the digital version
versus the print version in terms of how they feel about the
legitimacy of their work? MEISLIN:
I think the web is less and less regarded as a second-class
citizen. As reporters realize their exposure on the website
is the same as or, in some cases, greater than their exposure
in the newspaper, and as they realize they are getting credit
for being first on the web with a story, it helps reinforce
the web’s legitimacy. JOHNSON:
I would say my career as a journalist has been as webcentric
as any, but when my writing shows up on The Times op-ed
page, I am not printing out the page from the digital version
– sad to say, Rich. The one I like to see is the one in
the newspaper, so there is still that kind of edge to it. THORBURN:
There seems to be a widespread belief that writing on the
web must be short, that readers won’t sit still for long
pieces. I’ve noticed that some Times stories are
longer in the print version. Rich, is this a common practice? MEISLIN:
The people who do breaking
news for us tend to write somewhat shorter, if for no other
reason than we expect them to respond quickly to the news. We
also figure that people who are coming online for updates expect
just that, and are willing to wait for a more fully fleshed
out story. But stories from The New York Times newspaper are the same length on the web as they are in the newspaper, and occasionally longer if an otherwise worthy story is cut back in the paper simply for space reasons. Also, keep in mind there’s considerable web viewership each week of The New York Times Magazine, which traffics primarily in long pieces. CHAN: Can you both comment about Salon, an online publication that was started by traditional journalists, and what you think about its recent problems? JOHNSON:
They went a different route from that of Feed. They raised
a lot of money, and they grew really big. It seemed like it
was the right thing to do at the time they were doing it. There
was a period from 1998 to April of this year when the markets
were saying, “Your growth is all that matters, and you
really don’t need to worry about losing money. We’ll
figure out how to make money down the line.” And so Salon
followed that route and spent a lot of money and got up to about
140 or 150 people. The markets just turned unbelievably quickly,
and so they’ve had to scale back. So
there’s the big question of whether a mid-sized, stand-alone,
upscale magazine-format site that pays a lot for content and
doesn’t have a corporate patron can make it right now.
Whether they can make it right now is certainly a question.
It’s a longer-term question of whether those things are
even sustainable on the web. I suspect they probably are, but
I don’t know if Salon has enough cash on hand to
find out. MEISLIN:
You said Salon and I heard Slate. Slate
has Microsoft backing them, and that makes life a lot easier.
We have The New York Times. It is a very difficult world
out there for people who are either in the public market or,
God forbid, who were waiting to get into the public market to
finance a content company. JOHNSON:
There is a site called Thesmokinggun.com. MEISLIN:
That’s funny, I was just thinking about them. It is exactly
the opposite kind of growth from Salon. You start out
very small and you essentially don’t spend until your
revenues start covering it. JOHNSON:
Right. I saw a story that they sold to somebody for $600,000.
Did you see that? The thought that occurred to me at the time
was, “you know, that’s the way it should have been.”
You start your one- or two-person webzine. Maybe you grow it
up to five people. It takes off and things go really well for
you, and you end up selling it and you make $600,000! If you
did that in 1994 or 1995, we would have said, “That’s
amazing, you don’t sell out and you make $600,000. That’s great!” But
somehow, $80 billion showed up as the goal, and now we’re
saying, “If I don’t make a billion with my contentzine
my parents are going to be very disappointed in me.” But,
maybe we’re moving back; maybe we can just kind of forget
the last three years happened. When we started Feed,
we had absolutely no financial goals for it at all, but it was
hard to resist the feeling that perhaps there was a big payday
somewhere down the line. Perhaps there is a payday, but if it’s
a much smaller one, then maybe that’s a more sustainable
system.
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