Selling of the New York Times

Let the Times be Google

A similar posting by me appeared in BreakingViews

Google, with a market value of $86bn may or may not be wildly overpriced. But the fact an upstart, selling nothing but access to information, is worth more than 20 times The New York Times Company, proud owner of the US paper of record, is a stunning fact. How can the Times get a piece of the Google magic?

Certainly it needs a boost as the company these days can’t satisfy anyone. Its quarterly earnings reported yesterday were down by 52% on higher payroll, printing and distribution coats. Editorially, it obsesses in scandals of its own making, such as Jayson Blair and, recently, the Judith Miller affair. Like all newspapers it suffers from competition from the web. The Times own web site is popular—21 million unique visitors in September-- but readers were irked when they were asked to pay for access to the newspaper’s columnists.

One would be hard pressed to say that Google is a superior portal to information than is the Times Company (which also owns other newspapers, and television and radio stations). But the Times, even more than Dow Jones or Gannett, has failed to monetize its information, and seems to have no solid plan to do so. Still in a late ‘90s era which glorified “eyeballs,” the Times has refused to charge online readers. Then it took a half-step by charging for its opinion columns.

What it should do is sell the daily paper online. Sure it will lose some readers, but if the Times is compelling, millions will pay. Then it should monetize yesterday’s papers, which no one normally pays for. It then should make the Times archive into a massive, searchable database. The database should be free, but indispensable. In other words it should be good enough that it can be funded by ads targeted to the search term: the same business that made Google rich.

Google says it wants to catalogue the world’s information. But it owns none of it. Surely the fact that the Times produces buckets of information should be worth something.