Right Voices

Don’t get too excited, they won’t be closing shop, they hope!  Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of The New York Times has made a habit of never speaking to the press, and from the looks of this article, he should have kept quiet.  His company is already in trouble:

profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company’s market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe.

As if that weren’t enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.

One would think with that kind of hostility facing a person, their solution would be more than:

“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.

He might want to care.  Those kinds of statements don’t endear you to the stockholders!  And these statements most certainly will raise an eyebrow or two:

Will it be free?

No, Sulzberger says. If you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay.

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.”

And while on community, the scandal about Jayson Blair, the reporter caught plagiarizing and fabricating, hurt the brand, not the business, he says. Blair was forced to quit in May 2003.

You’re one of the few papers that continues to print on broadsheet, which people consider to be too big and clumsy. Until when?

“Until when? The New York Times has no intention of changing that,” Sulzberger promises. At any rate, transitioning from broadsheet to tabloid would be prohibitively expensive, he says.

Do you feel that the newspaper world is weakening? Are advertisers pressing harder for better deals?

“Advertisers always press harder for better deals and influence over content,” Sulzberger says. But the New York Times has nothing to apologize for and no reason to fold, “as long as I’m sure that what we wrote and what we’re about to write is right.”

I’m with Morgan Stanley on this one…