Here’s a great item from last week that slipped through the cracks… A rare peek into the mind of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, which grew out of a casual conversation with Haaretz‘s Eytan Avriel at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A couple of choice sections follow…
On moving beyond print:
Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says…..”The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.
The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.
Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.
On the persistent need for editors — Sulzberger talks about newspapers reinventing themselves as “curators of news”:
In the age of bloggers, what is the future of online newspapers and the profession in general? There are millions of bloggers out there, and if the Times forgets who and what they are, it will lose the war, and rightly so, according to Sulzberger. “We are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust,” he says.
“We aren’t ignoring what’s happening. We understand that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was 10 years ago.
“Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” he says. “But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world.”
The expression “curator of the news” is great! What it tells us is that the NYTimes could go to exclusive on-line presentation yet it would still be “curated” as if it were the paper edition. What’s more this curation process would easily span the blogger sources, but avoid their inefficiencies in conveying the news.
Economical comprehension in “uncurated” on-line news is immediately forestalled by a need for rapid and extensive deletion of presented material. In fact, the advent of the “delete” key itself marks the transition from analog to digital technologies. There is no delete key on a Linotype or a typewriter.
A simple demonstration of the current inefficiency posed by deletions of reading material is the Google search or your daily purge of unneeded e-mail. The reading process requires a skill set for rapid deletion or de-selection of results which forestalls and interrupts efficient assimilation of concepts. This is a crippling circumstance for screen based reading and it may be endemic.