Two Paths for the News Business: Retrenchment versus Reshaping

The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times are venerable, first-tier journalistic enterprises.  The news about the news business, though, is generally downbeat: ad revenues going to the web, attention spans shrinking, and younger audiences ignoring "mainstream media."  The Monitor's response is to cut costs and go web-only, as they describe here.  Understandable, and kind of inevitable-feeling, don't you think?  Similarly, Conde Nast is implementing five percent cuts across the board (from Media Bistro, here).

The Times' response, though, is much more interesting and, I think, forward-looking.  They are taking all their content -- much of it best-of-breed -- and exposing it in APIs for the rest of the Internet to consume and re-purpose.  This is a bolder, harder-to-explain, but ultimately much more promising approach.  You can see example posts from their "Open" blog here (Campaign Finance data API) and here (Moview Reviews).

The Times' strategy, as I see it, is to invest to exploit the upside of the Internet: more connections to more audiences in more ways (at lower costs).  The "dead trees" business is, of course, threatened; but journalism was never meant to be about printing presses.  The presses, and their massive capital requirements, were an Industrial Age artifact that tended to lower profits and entrench incumbents (creating the "press lords" like Beaverbrook and now Murdoch, as a side effect).  The Times has always been about its writers (and photographers and other creative individuals); human and intellectual capital, and reputation capital, not physical capital.  If the Internet puts a premium on that intangible capital, and the resulting companies are smaller, they should be more profitable.  It's a long shot -- market forces may drive NYT to cut costs at all costs, and sacrifice its long-term future for its near-term survival -- but we can hope, and watch.