John Darnton, BLACK & WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER author, NY Times veteran: Mr. Media Interview

The great pleasure of being a novelist is that you can praise your friends and carve up your enemies by changing a few names and details to protect the innocent and fend off the guilty and, at the same time, take advantage of First Amendment protections.

At least that was my thinking as I laughed my way through John Darnton’s fifth work of fiction, Black & White and Dead All Over.

This roman à clef comes to us in the same twisted spirit as the 1996 sensation, Primary Colors by “Anonymous,” who was later revealed to be Newsweek columnist Joe Klein.

Darnton is a 42-year New York Times veteran reporter, editor and foreign correspondent who was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories that were smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law.

And I’m guessing fewer co-workers at the old Grey Lady are on speaking terms with him, thanks to Black & White.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with novelist and NEW YORK TIMES veteran journalist JOHN DARNTON by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Editor & Publisher *Columnist* to Daily Newspapers: Drop Dead

"I feel a bit guilty about this. After all, I write for and offer advice to newspapers on an industry website. I support the newspaper industry and hope that it can come through the current downturn and learn to thrive in the new media world. So, wouldn't I want to support it by continuing to pay for printed newspapers to land on my driveway each morning, as a sign of solidarity with the industry? After all, print revenues are keeping the industry afloat, since online revenues can't yet match print's. Umm, no, actually."

-- Steve Outing, "Stop the Presses" online columnist for Editor & Publisher, explaining why he cancelled his subscription to his local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera. (For the record, Mr. Media still gets two daily newspapers delivered to his driveway everyday, the St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times. That's not to say the handwriting isn't on the wall, but we're not ready to look at it that closely yet.)

Stephen Chao, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur, former Fox TV president: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

Return to Part One!


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Let’s make you more comfortable, and let’s talk about wonderhowto.com.

STEPHEN CHAO: Great.

ANDELMAN: And I’ll repeat it – wonderhowto.com. How did you get involved in this site?

CHAO: Well, about 2 years ago, I started with my partner, a guy named Mike Goedecke, and we were kind of all very amused, as you probably were, by the advent of pretty decent streaming as it was represented by YouTube, and I guess there’s now 250 other video streaming sites out there, 400. But it really seemed to cause a shift. Namely, “Wow, it’s not a bad experience.”

I don’t know how much you remember what it was like to download a file and play it back and go search for that file if you could -- it wasn’t very easy for me, and I’m okay at the computer. And it was a very painful experience. And around that same time, it was the tail end of when cable had said, “Video on demand, it’s the future. You’re going to be able to use your remote control and see anything you want.” And so as that kind of started to fade and then as the idea of streaming video started to happen, it was like, “Wow, there’s really something here that’s very exciting that really augurs toward something new. Who knows what it is?”

I happen to really enjoy YouTube, but I think it has its limitations for me as a television viewer, a media viewer, or an ex-programmer. Once I’ve exhausted the most viewed, most popular kind of sorting mechanisms, I run out of things to do. There’s no further place for me to go. And so Mike and I were kind of at this place looking and really loving streaming video on the Internet, and we said you know, the place that we just always spent our time with or without streaming video is in this strange area of instructional tutorials. We’ve just had this kind of little love affair privately with this category. For example, I happen to have bought six years ago, “Darren’s Dance Grooves,” if you happen to remember that. It was $19.99, and you could learn how to lock, pop, and something or other like ‘N Sync. And I did that for a summer with my kids, and we had some friends who were really good hip-hop choreographers, and we kind of did that. But that’s the kind of thing that I used to do in my spare time because it was video. It was fun and allowed me to get up and do something as opposed to not do something. Like with television, you kind of sit there, and you don’t move. And I just thought this active experience of instructional tutorials was always kind of fun. And obviously, if you’ve done workouts like the “Jane Fonda Workout” or something, everybody’s actually probably tried that once or twice in their life, you go this is kind of fun. You do something. It’s watching TV, but it makes you active. So two years ago, we said, “This is just really great.” Bob, do you ever play Sudoku or anything like that?

ANDELMAN: My daughter does and my wife, too.

CHAO: I see. Well, it’s a strange experience because on the one hand, you’re wasting time. On the other hand, you’re going “This is kind of fun, and maybe my brain’s getting a little bit better than it was before.” So that odd combination of being able to waste time and actually being able to educate yourself or think you’re educating yourself or actually educating yourself is a great experience for me. It’s a really odd sweet spot in my mind where I go, “Gosh, how great, I waste time, and I learn.” And you can take that either way. Again, you can choose to just waste time, or you can choose to really learn something, and you can choose to learn something and do something like dance like Darren or dance like Solja Boy, who does Superman, or you can learn to teach your cat how to poop in the toilet, or you can do anything that you want out there that’s only limited by your imagination. So once we said, “That’s an interesting category,” we said, “We really need to find everything out there.” I’m anticipating probably what your question is. We originally were going to produce a lot of how-to videos because I come from television, Mike comes from advertising, but we started looking around, and we found out there were really odd, eccentric, long-tail things in places that we never believed were possible.


ANDELMAN: You’re thinking of things like, “Make a Cat Hair Cat Toy at Home,” things like that?

CHAO: Ah, that would be “Clip of the Day,” yeah. Like that or “How to Taxidermy a Mouse or a Squirrel.” Those would be things that Mike and I would never choose to spend $600 to produce and edit and post up onto our site, but those were the things that were just endlessly long tail fascinating. So we quickly decided that we would be silly to try to out-produce the Internet, the web, the collective imagination of production that exists on the Internet across the whole world because the likelihood is somebody’s doing it interestingly and well. So we said, “Let’s search and index absolutely every single how-to in the solar system, and that’s what we’ll present.” So instead of saying we’re going to be a walled garden that’s going to make 2,000 a year or whatever number of videos we thought that we could do, we said our particular fascination would be to index and search everything. And so that’s really the definition of what we do. There’s certainly other sites out there who are how-to sites, and they’re making great how-to videos, but there isn’t any other site out there that searches and indexes every single thing, this walled garden, that walled garden, that walled garden, and more. So we cover the entire world of how-to. If it’s a how-to that’s free, we have it indexed, and we’re just really trying to create the perfect.

We’re just really trying to create perfect information in this niche space of how-to for the user. That’s really what our goal is, and we’re about to hit 100,000 videos indexed. Sometime this month we’re going to do that. And it’s onward and upward.

ANDELMAN: I have to say that, and it’s on the hot videos today if people listening want to check it out, the one that made me laugh out loud, probably not surprisingly, was “Make People Naked with Photoshop,” and it’s just amazing.

CHAO: It’s kind of weird. I have to tell you that one I look at practically everyday because it cycles up into the hot algorithm. It’s not something that I have ever showcased in “Pick of the Day.” It’s not something that we’ve editorially pushed or featured forward. It is something that people have found, and they keep viewing that darn video. It’s just amazing to me. So this is part of it which is what I love about, well, it’s true of TV, but what I love about the web and video experience on the web, you’ve got your Nielsen ratings right there. The Google Analytics is going to tell you how many people watched that video that you just cited today or in the last 30 days and the amount of time they spent on it and if they exited. So from a programming standpoint, it’s kind of thrilling to be able to program something and just watch it happen like make a toy out of cat hair, which is the featured “Pick of the Day.” I’ll be able to see what people thought right away. I can go to Google Analytics right now and find out the answer. It’s amazing.

ANDELMAN: Some of them are very funny. I have a question that came from the web chat. I’m going to paraphrase this a little bit.

CHAO: Sure.

ANDELMAN: Coll wants to know if there had ever been a time that you didn’t know how to do something, and how did you eventually find the solution? And I guess that would be before wonderhowto.com.

CHAO: That’s a good question. I’m a guy who’s got kids, and I’m from New Hampshire. A potato gun is something that is really a phenomenon from farms. So if you’re raised on a farm, you know how to build a potato gun. The potato gun is a very simple concept. It’s PVC pipe that you stick a potato into, and it’s got a chamber. You stick hairspray into it, and you ignite it with a barbecue lighter, and it shoots out a potato at 200 to 300 miles an hour. And it’s kind of a thing that farm kids do. I was raised in rural New Hampshire. It’s what you do. It’s not akin to NRA gunmanship. It’s just kind of a toy that you build that’s very fast and could be very damaging, but it’s kind of a toy that you build when you’re 13 or 14. So the answer to your question is when I was 13 or 14, there was barely television, but there certainly wasn’t Internet video, and there certainly wasn’t a robust kind of DVD tutorial market of DVDs for sale. So I had to go and track down friends who knew about the potato gun because while I’d seen it demonstrated, I didn’t know how to build it, and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. I had to call friends and say, “Hey, who’s built a potato gun?” And then I had to go to the dad, and the dad would tell me how to do it. And that is the normal process in life. On the other hand, these days you could look up potato gun on wonderhowto.com, and you’d have an answer and not have to go ask the dad, I suppose.

ANDELMAN: Eric Smith in the web chat has a question: “With the advent of so many video-centric web sites, both entertainment and now how-to sites, how do you plan on marketing your site so that it stands out from the crowd?”

CHAO: Eric, that’s a very good question. It’s kind of the challenge in the next year for me.

ANDELMAN: Well, your first answer, of course, is “I’m going to go on Mr. Media and have a live conversation.”

CHAO: That is absolutely correct! There’s no way to get around the fact that the best publicity and the best marketing is actually non-paid marketing. It just has the most integrity to it. It’s the fastest. It’s the most credible. It’s your default choice. Even if you had a billion dollars, you wouldn’t say, “I want to spend a billion dollars.” You want to say, “I want to create a really good product that people pass around, that people want to write about.”

So to answer your question, Eric, the first stop is to be able to get to the chatter class, which are people like Bob or The New York Times or BoingBoing or whatever it is, the people who control the media. And now the great thing is the media is more diffused. It’s not just The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. There’s a number of influential people out there like BoingBoing, like Mr. Media, etc., etc.

The first trick or task is really to, of course, make a good product. And the second thing is to really work on issues of publicity and press and spread the word that way. As an example, there was a New York Times piece on January 31, and then that one was picked up by BoingBoing the next day, and a press release followed. So that’s really the start of it. And then there are all these tools. You could buy links, you can buy traffic, you can create stunts that get publicity, you can have a very smart advisor like Todd Beck and then he’ll help you figure it out, you can write to blogs, you can make playlists for the person who runs Technorati. So I guess the choice, because there’s a lot of ways that you can pay for traffic and marketing, the choice is really to talk to the people through the different media, whether it’s blogs or hard copy in old media, and get the word out. That’s probably the best way.

ANDELMAN: What’s the start-up investment dollar-wise between you and your partners? And I know you have a venture capital firm that’s behind you.

CHAO: Right.

ANDELMAN: How much are we talking, Stephen?

CHAO: Okay. Well, I won’t disclose the amount that the venture capital firm put in only just cause I choose not to. But I will tell you that never having previously invested in a start-up Internet site, I thought it was really kind of interesting. Namely, we had spent approximately $500,000 to start up the site. Now that means we had two full-time programmers going probably for a year. We had really researched the world of how-to. Before we opened up, we had found tens of thousands of videos on 600 to 700 different servers. So in terms of walled gardens, we had sourced 600 to 700 walled gardens who really had true expertise in how-to. So we had kind of done our market research, and we really had kind of really well done our programming, our coding, and stuff like that. This was before we had a marketing plan. This was before we actually launched it live without password. We did launch it under our own funds. It was before we bought all the traditional kind of things that cost money like E & O insurance and stuff like that and heavy legal stuff that you need to do to be properly protected.

We spent half a million dollars to start up the business. We had not marketed. We had not done all of the things to be entirely street legal, but the great thing about that is, while that is a lot of money, it’s not a lot of money considering the fact that you can, if you build a smart business model, you can scale up, and the sky’s the limit. It’s the kind of really wonderful thing about the media, which is that if you build it properly, your ability to scale is kind of unlimited, and the Internet is a form of the media or certainly this particular wonderhowto.com. So the answer is probably a little bit more than it takes to open a restaurant or a dry cleaner but less than it costs to open a brick and mortar business by a country mile. It’s really been a fascinating process. It’s not horribly expensive to start an Internet business, which is why there are so many competitors out there cause the barriers to entry, at least in terms of capital, are pretty small.

ANDELMAN: I have to say I was stunned to hear that you had spent $500,000, pre-launch. That’s astounding to me.

CHAO: Astounding a lot or little?

ANDELMAN: It sounds like a lot.

CHAO: It is a lot.


ANDELMAN: It is a lot. I think if somebody invested $5,000 in Mr. Media, we’d probably own Microsoft. So if you guys are looking to invest further…

CHAO: To speak to that point, $500,000 in truth is more than most entrepreneurs will invest. I think that the standard number that you hear is anywhere between $150,000 and $300,000. We decided to go over that only because we were extremely picky about certain things, and we went through fully three redesigns, soup-to-nuts redesign, before we were ready to open it. There’s some pickiness to what we did that we didn’t have to spend that much. But again, in the scheme of things, we’re pretty happy with the product, and we’re very happy with the wonderhowto product. So we’ll see what happens, but we just said, “That’s the threshold. We’re going to spend that much money before, and we’ll spend as much as we need to be really happy that when we’re ready to open, it’s a full representation of who we are.”

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation CEO and president, Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

With $2.6 billion in assets, the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the 22nd largest foundation in the United States. Its mission is the betterment of the 26 communities in which it works and the promotion of journalism as a career and industry nationwide.

The latter part of Knight’s mission is particularly challenging at a time when traditional newspapers are shrinking and, in many cases, evaporating.

That puts Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and a former publisher of the Miami Herald, at the same crossroads that silent movies encountered with talkies, talkies with radio, radio with television, television with cable, and now traditional print journalism with online reporting, blogs, podcasting, v-logs, streaming media, and so on.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. It has a vital interest in seeing journalism survive in whatever form it takes.

I interviewed Ibargüen recently for an old media business magazine and liked his approach to a rapidly changing world, and I was delighted when he accepted my invitation for a second round of conversation.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Reading the newspaper this morning, I see we’ve got more bad news in the business. Even The New York Times is talking about cutting 100 jobs.

ALBERTO IBARGUEN: It’s something like eight percent of their newsroom, yes. They’re certainly not immune from the drop in national advertising and the drop in jobs and jobs/classified advertising. Those are two traditional mainstays of newspapers. They represented, for most newspapers, well over half the revenue, and both of those categories are way down.

ANDELMAN: How do we square what’s happening, like the announcement at The New York Times today, for example, about 100 jobs -- with the amount of money that someone like Rupert Murdoch is pouring into The Wall Street Journal all of a sudden? How do those two square with each other?

IBARGUEN: I don’t think anybody else could possibly have paid that much for The Wall Street Journal or for any newspaper because that’s not, I think, the reason why Rupert Murdoch was so interested in Dow Jones. I think Rupert Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones because he’s starting a competitor to CNBC, and Rupert Murdoch is as committed to news online as anyone else in big media. I’d say more so. So what he was buying was not the newspaper. What he was buying was the best news organization around, and so I would expect that, over time, those resources and that talent, when the talent is enormous at The Wall Street Journal for covering business news, it is a great newspaper, that that talent will be applied on television and online.


ANDELMAN: So as far as print journalism goes, that was actually a pessimistic purchase rather than an optimistic purchase.

IBARGUEN: It’s hard to call that much money pessimistic, but I guess you’re right.

ANDELMAN: What about, if we move further West with that, what about Sam Zell and him buying the Chicago Tribune, plus the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel? He doesn’t have that same kind of online or electronic package, or does he?

IBARGUEN: No, I don’t think it’s the same, and I’m not sure that the deal is the same either. That one engaged a great deal, I think, of employee money. I don’t know if it was their retirement funds. I know that the Tribune Foundation became a contributor to that purchase. I think, in Chicago, the Tribune Company has long had lots of synergy with television and online, and I’m honestly not on the inside so I don’t know how they’re doing with that. In their smaller papers, they may be able, at least for a period of time, and Sam’s in Ft. Lauderdale here in Florida or in Orlando, they may be able to do reasonably well. They are, traditionally, newspapers that were run at very high margins, much, much more profitable on a percentage basis than say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they really did also depend on classified advertising and national advertising.

I think the picture for the national papers is actually not bad if they can figure out the online piece because online is part of the worldwide web, not the local, geographically defined web. And by thinking of it as a national paper, you can begin to have the kind of national scale that the web seems to be naturally suited for.

The ones that I think are also probably okay, at least for the short-term, are the papers in very small communities where they still can publish the local news, whether it’s the high school football team or what happened at city hall. They can do that better than anybody else. The ones that are really getting squeezed are the so-called major metros, and that would include the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, even the Los Angeles Times because those regional papers are trying to do something in between the national scope that fits the web so well and the very local, local, almost neighborhood scope that the small town dailies are doing. So those are the ones that you’re seeing the biggest stress on, and there are some like the Boston Globe, a great newspaper, that although it made some money last year, I think the year before, they actually lost money. That would’ve been unthinkable five or 10 years before.

ANDELMAN: It seems like the smart move 20 or 25 years ago was for these major metros, the Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, and so forth across the country, to add regional editions and grow and spread out, but now we see some of that coming back, and maybe that wasn’t the way to move long-term.

IBARGUEN: Yes, hindsight’s wonderful, isn’t it?

ANDELMAN: I thrive on it, frankly. Yes.

IBARGUEN: We’re so smart after the fact. I don’t know what they could’ve done. When you were doing your introduction, you were talking about being in the position of the talkies with silent films and so forth. It actually was the position that Jack Knight, our founder, the founder of Knight Foundation, that Jack Knight found himself in at the beginning of the century when he actually built the second biggest newspaper company when newspapers were everything in news. He actually built the second biggest newspaper company by figuring out how to use new technology. Other people were being destroyed by it, and he figured out that because of improvements in transportation, improvements in printing, but mainly improvements in something fantastic and new at the beginning of the 20th century called the telephone, he could actually create a newspaper company that he could run from one place but ultimately in 26 cities, actually in his brother’s lifetime in 26 cities.


The point is that he knew, he figured out, how to use this new technology in a way to expand his business from one single newspaper in Akron, Ohio, and to be able to ultimately run a newspaper company out of Miami, Florida, that included Philadelphia and San Jose and Wichita and Biloxi and Duluth and St. Paul, Detroit, Michigan, and be able to do it all from here because of the telephone. That would’ve been unthinkable when that technology was first introduced or when Jack Knight first started to run the Akron Beacon-Journal.

And so I think one of the things that we try to do at Knight Foundation is, to be honest, we’re not responsible for figuring out how to keep these jobs. We’re not responsible for delivering a 25 or 20 or even 15 percent margin to investors. We’re trying to figure out, “How do you use that new technology?” Let’s experiment with different ways of delivering news and information because, in the end, we still do all live in geographically-defined communities. We still have environmental policy, education, who fixes the potholes are all ultimately decided by people we elect by geographically-defined communities, and either we change the construct of our governing structure, or we have to figure out a way of getting the people who are making those election choices better information, and it has to be electronic. It has to be digital.

ANDELMAN: As you said that, I’m thinking about how things have changed on one level. I think Ed Koch of New York City used to be known as “Mayor Pothole.”

IBARGUEN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Right? And now we’ve got Mayor Bloomberg who is trying to affect national policy from his mayor’s seat. It’s a very different kind of world even at that level.

IBARGUEN: It really is. And Mayor Koch was fantastic. I happened to live in New York at the time, and there wasn’t a pothole that he couldn’t pay attention to. There wasn’t a ribbon-cutting. And Bloomberg has a different appreciation. Given his background and given what he built in his company, the Bloomberg Business Systems that he built that were an early and phenomenal user of digital technology to deliver business information.

There is another aspect, by the way, of the current newspaper problem, and maybe it’s also true of broadcast television, I’m not sure, and it’s the nature of the ownership. When newspapers were owned, up until the 1960s, there wasn’t any newspaper company that was a publicly held company. They were all family-owned or individually owned, and it didn’t matter whether it was the Meyers and the Grahams who owned the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers who owned The New York Times or the Chandlers in Los Angeles, Knight-Ridder, etc. In the mid-‘60s, the companies started to go public. There were great benefits to going public. You could raise a lot of money, you could invest a lot in the business, and it was a terrific growing concern.

But as ownership started to shift from the families to people who were interested in newspapers to institutional investors, the demand on newspapers, and at the same time, there was new technology coming along, not just radio then television, which were already there, but with the web and with cable, that really began cutting into the advertising base of the newspaper model. There was this sort of perfect storm of web and cable cutting into the advertising base at the same time that the investors in newspapers became more and more institutional investors. And institutional investors not only don’t, but cannot care about the basic function of the newspaper - that is the delivery of news and information to a community.

Jack Knight cared, and, in fact, when he went to Wall Street, there’s a very famous speech that he gave the only time that he went to talk to analysts, and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t like the way I run Knight Newspapers then I suggest you buy another newspaper company’s stock because I’m not gonna change. I’m running this in the way that I think a newspaper should be run.” And that was a luxury that I think his successors didn’t have when a fella named Sherman a couple years ago decided that Knight-Ridder at, whatever it was, a 20 percent margin, wasn’t making enough money and forced the sale of the company. I’m reminded of that because I saw a note in the paper this morning that said that Mr. Sherman is now 100 percent out of newspapers, zero. He used to own some part of Belo. He used to own some part of The New York Times. He used to own a big chunk of McClatchy, which is a company that bought Knight-Ridder, and now he owns nothing.

It’s a different kind of commitment. A newspaper is not going to leave the town. An institutional investor will invest in the newspaper in the same way it might invest in a shoe company, it might invest in a rug company, it doesn’t matter. It’s just simply another type of investment, and they’ll do it for a period of time, and then they’ll either stay in because they continue making money or get out without any sentimentality. A news organization, whether it’s television or cable or even and certainly newspapers, cannot…The Miami Herald cannot leave Miami. And so there’s that institutional part that seems to me to be incompatible with institutional investors. And I think that’s a really big problem for, I believe, for all of the publicly held newspaper companies.


ANDELMAN: There seemed to be a time, and again, I go back 20 to 25 years when it almost seemed like a good idea to have people with good business sense to come into the newspaper business and apply some fundamentals to the operation. The problem is, I think, that the business has been changed in the last 10 years by technology and other things. It takes more than just business sense to make a newspaper work.

IBARGUEN: I think it’s a combination of problems as I indicated a minute ago. I think there is new technology that is absolutely disruptive – that is cable to television and Internet to both television and certainly to newspapers. So there’s disruptive new technology, and by the way, that’s not a negative. That’s simply a fact. It disrupts the old model in a major way, and so the people who are going to win are the ones who figure out how to deliver what the community needs on the new platforms. I firmly believe that’s what Jack Knight did in his day in the beginning of the 20th century, and I believe that’s what we’re searching for now.

But there’s another factor, which is that the institutional investor is looking for a return. The institutional investor, that is the Legg Masons of this world, don’t really care whether Philadelphia is informed, whether Tallahassee is informed, whether St. Petersburg is informed. They care whether you return the amount of money that they planned to have you return. And so if you returned 14 percent, and they were planning 13, then that’s great. And with newspapers, they came to expect somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of money when you have your core business, the business side, the core business attacked and under great pressure as in the case of national advertising and with the web coming on so strong on classified advertising for jobs and that sort of thing. Think about it. If you go buy a car, it’s just too easy to look up on the web virtually every model that you can think about. The last three cars I bought I basically shopped for online and sort of gone for the test drive, but I really haven’t gone to do much other comparison.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Netscape This! Marc Andreessen's NY Times Deathwatch

"When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price."

-- Marc Andreessen, co-author of what was once the Internet web browser, Netscape, raging against the machine of The New York Times in a Fortune magazine column by Josh Quittner, "A Tech Pioneer's Newspaper Deathwatch." (Quittner and Andreessen no doubt had a lot to talk about. Time Warner put both of their babies to death in the past year, Andreessen's Netscape and Quittner's Business 2.0 magazine.)

One more thing: Quittner's column, "Techland," isn't exactly the highest of high tech. In its online version, companies mentioned are highlighted as links. But his link to Andreessen's blog isn't. So here you go: blog.pmarca.com

Dave Jones, "The New York Times" assistant managing editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic (1997)

Originally Published March 17, 1997

If daily newspapers are truly on the endangered species list, The New York Times didn't get the memo.

While other newspapers cut back and staff on pages or blunder their way into electronic publishing, the Gray Lady is adding regional editions in Boston and Washington, D.C. and breaking out sports and culture into stand-alone sections for the first time. It also produces one of the most outstanding electronic newspaper editions and will soon publish color photos and ads.

What does the Times know that other papers don't?

"We think that good journalism is good business," says Dave Jones, an assistant managing editor and editor of national editions for the Times. "It has been our experience that, as we have improved the paper, we have prospered. So there's no reason not to invest more."

The expansion will be part of Jones' legacy at the paper. After 34 years with the Times, Jones, 64, will retire next year after shepherding many of these upgrades into existence.

"It's a busy time," Jones says, shucking off the legacy notion. "I don't think about that. We're charging readers and advertisers more for the paper and we feel we need to give them added value for the higher prices we're charging."

Still, at a time when most papers are reducing their news hole -- the space given to articles -- the Times is making news in media circles with its coming expansion from four daily sections to six -- eight by 1999 -- made possible by a new $350 million printing press. That press will also make color photos, graphics and ads possible in the daily paper by this fall. (Color currently only appears in the Sunday features sections.)




The Times is also expanding in more unusual ways.

On Feb. 18, for example, the paper launched new regional editions published in and for Washington, D.C., and the Boston/Greater New England area.

"We concluded a few years ago that we would better serve our readers if we could give them a later newspaper," Jones explains. "We were closing the first edition of the newspaper in New York at 9 o'clock at night, which we deemed too early to give the best service to our readers. What was really driving that was our need to produce papers in time to truck them four hours to Boston and Washington for home delivery."

By printing regionally, the Times will push back its first edition deadlines this fall in New York, Boston and Washington from 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., allowing the inclusion of more late-breaking news, making the paper more competitive in all three metro areas with the 11 o'clock TV news.
The bigger benefit will be the availability of home distribution in many new markets. For example, the Boston Globe, which the Times bought a few years ago, now offers home delivery of both papers across most of New England. In addition, the Times recently announced deals with more than 30 local newspapers around the U.S. and Canada in which the Times' national edition will be delivered to homes and newsstands side-by-side with papers such as the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Sacramento Bee, Toronto Globe & Mail and Tacoma News-Tribune.

"The regional papers don't see our paper as a great threat to their fundamental circulation," Jones says. "And, indeed, it isn't. We feel we are a second read outside of New York. I find it hard to believe most people would substitute the New York Times for their local newspaper. If they're interested enough in the Times, I can't believe they wouldn't be interested enough in the local news that their paper provides that we can't. We have other strengths. I think these papers will complement each other. We don't expect our circulation to surge hugely because of this, but we think greater availability of the paper will benefit us in the long run."

No doubt. The national edition of the Times -- a slimmer, three-section version -- already mushroomed from 25,000 daily sales in 1980 to 279,000 daily and 389,000 Sunday.
All editions of the paper will see growth in the months and years ahead. First up: stand-alone sections for sports and culture in the Northeast editions.




"We're probably the only major metropolitan paper that hasn't had a separate sports section," Jones says, acknowledging a major complaint of some readers over the years. "We've spent a great deal of effort in recent years improving our sports report. We've increased the staff, the news hole and the quality of the work."

Look for those sections to be first to experiment with color in the months ahead. It's a monumental change for the world's most revered newspaper, one not taken lightly.

"We are very sensitive to changes in the paper," Jones says. "Our readers are very loyal; they don't like radical change. The paper changed a great deal in recent years but the changes have always been gradual. Color tends to be more stark, more obvious.

"We will apply the same news standards when we go to color that we apply to non-color," he says. "We'll have a subtle approach that's based on news values. Color will gradually be spun out over a period of months. The timetable will be set by how happy we are with how it's evolving. At some point we'll have the capacity and the confidence that we know what we're doing and the event will come along where it makes sense to use color on the front page."
Why is the New York Times prospering when other papers are not?

"We appeal to people who are really interested in the news," Jones says. "Most newspapers around the country tend to concentrate on local news and sports; we bring a different perspective. We give more attention to national and international. And I think there's a large portion of the reading community out there that wants a connection to the culture and sophistication of New York."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Speaking of Dead Media

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either."

-- Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the New York Times, confirming at the World Economic Forum in Davos (and reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz) the worst fears of ink-stained wretches everywhere. He also said, "Internet is a wonderful place to be and we're leading there."

The Mr. Media List

Congratulations to former Spy Magazine writer and editor George Kalogerakis, whose wedding to Daphne Poser was announced in the New York Times "Weddings/Celebrations" page on Sunday. Kalogerakis is now the deputy editor of the Times' Op-Ed page.

The final line of the announcement was rather ominous for Ms. Poser, however: "The bridegroom's previous marriage ended in divorce."

Sounds like somebody's wedding announcement was edited by a certain vengeance-seeking three-fingered vulgarian.

Slow News Day?

"The biggest problem is razor burn."

-- Actress/writer/director Stormy Daniels, explaining to New York Times reporter Matt Richtel one of the major challenges confronting the pornography industry with its push into high-definition DVDs. The story, "In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real," appeared Monday on the front page of the paper's Business section. On the plus side for HD porno: "It puts you in the room," according to director Robby D. (Sex Freak).

Buchwald, Out

"Hi. I'm Art Buchwald and I just died."

-- Legendary humorist Art Buchwald in the video of his own obituary, a new feature of The New York Times web site. It's not for everybody; Mr. Media found it amusing; the Mrs., not so much.