The Trusty Servant

There is a lengthy article in The Atlantic about the possible demise of the New York Times. The basic storyline is familiar, although the detail may not be: there has been a massive shift in advertising away from print media and TV and onto the web.

I admit that it takes a story like this to bring things home to me. I rarely click on web ads, and used to find the early ads hugely irritating, especially the more extreme types, which mercifully now seem to be disappearing. Equally, I tended to laugh at the gross overvaluation of Google. But the fact is that web advertising is now big business. It works. Indeed, it is much easier to track its effectiveness than to track the effectiveness of print or TV ads.

The consequence is that many major newspapers are having a hard time, and things are getting worse as the recession deepens. For the first time people are wondering whether the NYT could even disappear later this year. The New York Times Company (ticker NYT) owns 18 newspapers, including two well-known titles apart from the NYT itself: the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune. Its share price (currently under $5) has fallen by two-thirds since the Lehman collapse and now values the group at well under $1 billion.

According to the Atlantic article, the major problem is its debt. It claims that the company is likely to have difficulty renewing its $400M short-term debt falling due in May. The analysis is apparently based on work by Henry Blodget, so it may well be right. Connoisseurs of financial disasters will remember him as the author of the famous “POS” emails which cost Merrill Lynch a few hundred million for their earthy and accurate description of the new issues Merrills was foisting onto others. Having said that, I am not sure I entirely follow is analysis. If you look at the latest 10Q, NYT has a $800M facility, less than half used, only half of which matures in May. Maybe it has haemorrhaged a few hundred million since then.

But the timing is slightly beside the point. It is certainly true that the NYT is likely to have extreme difficulty in continuing to fund its current level of global news coverage. The Atlantic has some interesting speculation on how it might migrate closer to the Huffington post model.

I was pondering this when my eye was caught by a story in the LA Times about a hapless mother thrown in jail for three months under terrorism laws for smacking her children on a domestic flight to Denver. The children were fostered out, and may now be adopted against her will:

Tamera Jo Freeman was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled a Bloody Mary into her lap. She spanked each of them on the thigh with three swats … A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.

Enough to get anyone jumping up and down with rage about laws that empower flight attendants to chuck their weight around and behave like petty tyrants.

But now look on the blogosphere. A former prosecutor debunks the story, going into elaborate details with meticulous reference to the court documents, with long extracts in his post and links to enable anyone to see them for himself on payment of less than a dollar.

I was almost convinced. I had a nagging worry about his reference to the plea agreement in which she put matters rather differently:

On July 16, 2007, the Defendant and her two young children were passengers on Frontier flight #1 08, an airplane in flight between San Francisco, Califomia and Denver, Colorado. During the flight, and within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, passengers observed the Defendant yelling, cursing, and striking her children. One passenger reported the Defendant’s conduct to flight attendant Amy Fleming. Ms. Fleming attempted to intervene. When she contacted the Defendant, the Defendant began yelling at Ms. Fleming that she wanted another drink because hers had been spilled. Ms. Fleming refused to serve her another alcoholic drink. The Defendant continued to cause a disturbance, cursing at Ms. Fleming, telling her, “You fucking bitch, get away from me.”

and added further material

Ms. Fleming asked another flight attendant to notify the Captain of the disturbance. When the Defendant got out of her seat to go to the lavatory, Ms. Fleming followed her. When the Defendant left the bathroom, she continued to curse and yell at Ms. Fleming with her hands flying and fingers pointing. Ms. Fleming felt threatened and got into a defensive stance at that point. Flight Attendant Fleming handed the Defendant a “red card” which Ms. Freeman threw back at her. Ms. Fleming then retrieved restraint tape and warned the Defendant she would physically restrain her if she hit the children again. Ms. Fleming also reseated a passenger who worked as a correctional officer across from the Defendant so that he could assist as necessary. Ms. Fleming would testify that the actions of the Defendant intimidated her and interfered with the performance of her assigned duties.

My worry was that the price of a plea agreement might be that matters were not quite described the way a defendant would prefer. But the former prosecutor obligingly supplied a friendly reference to another viewpoint:

The estimable Scott Greenfield at his blog Simple Justice thinks that I am too accepting of the court records, and disagrees with some other points as well. He knows what he’s talking about, so it’s well worth a read.

I could not resist clicking on that and got a detailed rebuttal of the first blog.

In other words, the blogosphere at its best offers quite a different style of journalism. It gives easy access to original documents and presents wildly differing opinions. In other words, it offers the opportunity for a much more active style of reading where you can make up your own mind.

On the other hand, prose of the quality of the national newspapers is relatively rare. Much of what you read is badly written. Little is edited. Most is badly researched, and there is an ocean of mindless comment.

Another obvious problem is foreign correspondents. No one in London is likely to rush off to Gaza to blog from there. Are they? Well, it is not quite that simple. Blogs are often available from locals or tourists in trouble-spots, often of surprisingly high quality. Then a Huffington post type operation could afford salaried bloggers who were paid to act as foreign correspondents. There could also be formal links of one kind or another, so that a particularly good blogger might syndicate his material to several paying sites. It would still be dramatically cheaper than an NYT-type operation.

In any case, the web material is all free, which is a compelling advantage for many people. Certainly not all. Newspapers are cheap enough that cost is unlikely to weigh heavily with anyone short of time. Such people are likely to prefer their favourite national newspaper, which can give them far more interesting or useful material in fifteen minutes than they can get in the same time from the web. Such people may also enjoy scanning their newspaper in the bath or over breakfast. But whether that kind of audience is enough for the major quality newspapers to remain viable in their current form is becoming more and more doubtful.