A Bit of Good News About Journalism
BY JOHN CASSIDY
Earlier this week, in a post about the fallout from major editorial turnover at The New Republic and journalistic flaws in a Rolling Stone account of an alleged sexual assault at a University of Virginia fraternity, my colleague George Packer noted that “the crisis in journalism is a business crisis, and it’s been going on for twenty years.” That’s perfectly accurate. With the arrival of the Internet, the old business model of relying mainly on revenues from print advertising, both display and classified, was fatally undermined, and efforts to replicate the advertising model on the Web have largely failed. Publishers know this story all too well, and they are still struggling to deal with it.
Earlier this year, Time Warner hived off Time Inc., which is still the nation’s largest magazine company, as a separate entity. The Tribune Company did the same thing with its newspaper arm, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, many publishers are still downsizing. At the New York Times, another hundred newsroom posts have just been eliminated through buyouts, and many able and experienced journalists are leaving. (They include Floyd Norris, the financial commentator; Bill Carter, the television reporter; and Steven Greenhouse, the labor reporter.)
At such a moment, it may seem a bit off to focus on the positives. But there are some encouraging things happening. While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view. Far from giving up on journalism, they are providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism, such as this story, from The Verge, a Vox site, which details how the N.Y.P.D. is using social media to lock up Harlem teens, and this interview that Vice scored with James Mitchell, the psychologist who helped the C.I.A. to develop its “enhanced interrogation”—i.e., torture—techniques.
In addition, online journalism is thriving at many publications that are still widely regarded as “old media.” At the New York Times and other major newspapers, digital subscriptions are rising steadily. To be sure, the revenues from this source haven’t fully replaced all the lost revenues from print subscriptions and print advertising: in some parts of the industry, this may well never happen. But subscription-based journalism (encompassing digital and print) is rapidly becoming financially viable, at least for national publications. And that really is good news. Advertising-funded journalists are beholden to advertisers, page-view metrics, and social-media algorithms. Subscription-funded journalists are beholden to readers.
Five or ten years ago, it was often said that readers wouldn’t pay for online journalism—or wouldn’t pay enough to make it profitable. That thinking meant that adopting a free-content model was the only option. Today, you rarely hear this argument, and for good reason. Take the New York Times: In its most recent quarterly report, the New York Times Company reported that, at the end of September, it had eight hundred and seventy-five thousand subscribers to its “digital-only” products. The number of digital subscribers had increased by forty-four thousand over the previous quarter, and by twenty per cent compared to the end of 2013. What this means is that for every five print subscribers, theTimes now has about four digital-only subscribers. And these figures underestimate its digital audience. The vast majority of its print subscribers also enroll for digital access. I’d wager that a lot of them, like me, wouldn’t subscribe to the print edition if they couldn’t also access the online version.
The rise of online subscriptions isn’t confined to the Times. According to figures from the Alliance for Audited Media, the Wall Street Journal now has more than nine hundred thousand digital subscribers. (Its total circulation is close to 2.3 million.) The Financial Times, which helped to pioneer the metered-paywall model, which allows readers to read a certain number of stories a month before being charged, has gone further in this direction than any other major newspaper. According to Rachel Taube, a spokeswoman for the paper, it now has 476,000 digital subscribers, compared with 217,171 print subscribers. Although it is still known as the Pink ’Un, a reference to the pink paper it is printed on, it is now predominantly a digital publication.
Buying these newspapers in digital form isn’t cheap. For an online subscription that gives you access to everything, the New York Times charges $455 a year. The Journal charges $348. The Financial Times charges $467. To some extent, as I remarked a couple of years ago, newspapers are turning into luxury goods. But when you have hundreds of thousands of readers each paying hundreds of dollars a year, the revenues quickly add up. Eventually, they can transform the bottom line.
At the FT Group, which also includes a fifty per cent stake in The Economist, more than sixty per cent of the company’s revenues now come directly from content, which includes digital and print subscriptions, and advertising provides less than forty per cent.* The newspaper has been profitable for quite a while. Taub also told me that profits grew in the first half of 2014, driven by a rise in digital revenues. A spokesperson for the Journal wouldn’t comment on its finances, but earlier this month, the newspaper’s corporate sibling, Times Newspapers of the United Kingdom, which publishes the Times and the Sunday Times, recorded its first operating profit in thirteen years. That’s particularly notable because Times Newspapers was one of the first U.K. publishers to ditch the free-content model. Five years ago, it was losing more than a hundred million dollars a year.
Of course, none of this means that journalism is out of the woods. Regional newspapers, which by definition have smaller markets than national ones, have been hit particularly hard by the decline in print advertising. Magazines, especially small ones, such as The New Republic, also face major challenges, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post. Throughout the industry, job cuts and efforts to restrict wages and benefits will probably continue. Unless publishers can find a way to expand digital advertising and supplement the money they get from subscriptions, keeping costs in line with revenues will always be a demanding task. That means funding big, time-consuming investigative projects will continue to be a problem. But the argument that newspapers are dinosaurs, destined to be replaced by nimbler online competitors, looks a good deal less convincing than it did a few years ago. And considering where we have been, that qualifies as good news.
Newspapers that were slower to embrace the digital-subscription model are rushing to catch up. Since Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, in October, 2013, the paper has been hiring journalists, retooling its Web site, and urging readers to sign up for online access. (Today, you can get a digital subscription, which includes full access to the Web site and apps, for the bargain price of $99.) Kristine Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Post, told me, “We have beaten the early goals we set for digital subscriptions and have been very encouraged by the response throughout this year.” The newly independent Tribune Publishing is pursuing a similar strategy. As Jack Griffin, the company’s C.E.O., said recently, “While our digital-only customer base is small today, at fewer than fifty thousand subscribers, we are confident that the full implementation of our pay digital strategy and our new products will allow us to grow this customer base and revenue base significantly over time.”
*Clarification: This post has been updated to make clear that the revenue figures for the Financial Times refer to the Financial Times Group, and not just the paper.
