Mark Andreessen: NYT Should Shut Down Print Edition "as soon as possible".

Another well-meaning, smart outsider with a real dumb idea. Here's a plan. Let's dump 80-90 percent of current revenue for a bright new tomorrow that may never happen. If Facebook isn't making money off Internet advertising, how is the Times supposed to?

 

This is not going to happen anytime soon (and, by extension, the 600 or so clients who put Times stories in their print products from the NYT News Service). I put my copy down in public, and it's picked up by someone within a couple of minutes.

 

In 1998 Greg McLemore saw what was coming next: Pets.com.

Not all examples of success or failure in business are interchangeable.

 

Are they?

My notion of this is that you eliminate a lot of overheard by dumping the print product, then you aren't reliant on advertising for profit any more - it comes from subscription sales instead.

 

Printing and distribution removal does not save as much as lost print advertising revenue costs you. If you're all digital, subscription revenue is a wash, because of course people pay for one subscription in whatever medium you're using.

 

Times readers:

http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/09/28/digital-is-now-first-and-print-second-for-most-loyal-readers-of-the-new-york-times

Still, 45 percent prefer print. That's a hell of a lot of readers.

Speaking of folks associated with Facebook and old institutions, there was an interesting story in NY Mag last week about Chris Hughes, the new owner of New Republic.

http://nymag.com/news/features/chris-hughes-2012-12/

 

The money for a company like the Times has to come from subscriptions.

But, as others have pointed out, the Times is in a pretty unique position. They actually produce original reporting on a wide variety of topics.

It's worth buying. Not sure how many other papers are.

 

I'm sure I've said it here before, but there is a lot for newspapers to learn from Apple. People hated Apple in the early post-Napster world -- thought they were choking off the free flow of information purely to satisfy their own greed. But Apple stuck with it, and soon enough people saw that iTunes was a convenient and sensible pay-as-you-go business model.

But it takes some money to ride out the adjustment period, and it takes the guts to look like the bad guys pursuing copyright violations all over the world.

 

Who the hell is Mark Andreessen?

And what's his agenda?

 

He co-founded Netscape.

 

?

Honestly?

 

His main claim to fame was dumping that white elephant for billions, much as Cuban did with Broadcast.com