Tag Archives: publishing

February 8, 2013 · 12:51 pm

Times’ paywall is paying very well

By Christopher B. Daly

Buried in the business section of today’s New York Times is a story with some very encouraging news about the future of quality journalism. The story concerns the New York Times Company itself. There’s a lot of noise in there about the sales of assets such as About.com. There’s also the usual gloomy news about the continuing declines in print advertising (down 5.6 percent).

But there are also two positive signals in all the details:

1. Digital advertising revenues rose 5.1 percent. That’s the money the Times makes from selling the electronic ads that appear in the online version. They are rising from a small base, to be sure, but they represent the ad dollars of the future.

2. The biggest good news: revenue from circulation grew 16.1 percent. In other words, the Times‘ paywall is paying very well. I would say this story “buried the lead” — because this is the biggest news in a while. The increase in circulation revenue is certainly not coming from a surge in subscriptions to the old-fashioned print version of the paper; nor is it from an upswing in newstand sales. It is coming from people who bump into the Times‘ online “paywall” and decide that it’s worth paying for the Times‘ content online. That may well turn out to be the paper’s salvation: the readers.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYTCo official earnings statement:

Paid subscribers to The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions totaled approximately 640,000 as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2012, an increase of approximately 13 percent since the end of the third quarter of 2012.

That’s impressive. Readers in those numbers (plus some more, of course) could carry the paper into the digital future.

Can a restored dividend be far behind?

 

Here’s a chart of the company’s stock performance. NYTCo stock is up today, but it has a long way to go to get back to the glory days of a decade ago.

NYTCo stock

NYTCo stock

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January 27, 2013 · 2:37 pm

Book notes

By Christopher B. Daly

A couple of updates from the world of letters:

–My B.U. colleague Amy Sutherland has a Q+A with the estimable Tracy Kidder in the Boston Globe. A brief highlight:

BOOKS: Anything else you avoid?

KIDDER: Most biographies are too long. But I loved “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild. I don’t want to read any more memoirs about dysfunctional families. I don’t think it’s a form that should be condemmed. It’s just there’s been a surfeit of it.

I certainly agree with his point about biographies: they have become so vast that they are approaching the point where they are both un-readable and un-writable. There are a number of biographies I’d like to read and a handful I’d like to write, but the prospect of either is daunting. Bring back the short biography!

–My friend Amy Wilentz will be speaking this Friday at the Harvard Bookstore at 7 p.m. aboutWilentzAmy_creditPaulaGoldmanher new book on Haiti, which has been getting great reviews. Come if you can.

 

 

–I found this review in today’s NYTimes irritating. What bothers me is the premise that Adam Begley brought to his reading of a new history of Venice by Thomas F. Madden, titled Sunken Treasure. The reviewer takes the author to task for writing a book of history that tackles a great subject, synthesizes a tremendous amount of material, and writes a readable version for intelligent general readers. Where’s the harm?

But if it’s new, it’s not innovative. Madden has written a conventional narrative history, sweeping in scope and calmly, blandly authoritative. Though he’s a professional historian who teaches at St. Louis University, he seems more proud of his storytelling than his scholarship.

That view is what drives the mania among academic historians for writing books with novel arguments on arcane subjects. Later in the review, Begley calls Madden a “breezy, cheerful, evenhanded” debunker of myths. Begley begrudgingly allows that the last general history of Venice was written a generation ago, and that book dropped the tale in 1797. Madden has tapped newer research, brought the story up to the present, and done so in an engaging way. Why is that not enough?

Painting by Gentile Bellini/Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice (1496; detail)/Photographed by Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY

Painting by Gentile Bellini/Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice (1496; detail)/Photographed by Erich Lessing, Art Resource, NY

 

 

 

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April 22, 2012 · 5:15 pm

E-books

By Chris Daly

In the letters to the Times today about ebooks and the future of publishing, I am struck trying to figure out the answer to this question:

In all this upheaval, who is on the side of writers? (without whom, need it be said, there would be no books, in any format)

It feels kinda lonely here in the writer’s corner.

 

 

 

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November 3, 2011 · 9:12 am

Another one bites the dust

By Chris Daly

This is not another nostalgic piece about the demise of Filene’s Basement, prompted by today’s stories about the closing of the “legendary” discount retailer. (Fact is: I never really liked the place that much; in order to take full advantage of Filene’s Basement, you had to go there a lot, and I hate shopping, so it was not for me.) For people who care about the news business, the thorn on this withered rose is that there goes another source of display advertising for Boston-area newspapers.

When I was a kid delivering those newspapers in the 1960s, Filene’s department store (and not just the basement) did battle with Jordan Marsh from their proud flagship stores facing each other across Summer Street, and they competed with a slew of other department stores as well, including Gilchrist’s and some others I have forgotten. Back then, when those stores had “white sales” or wanted to tout their new fall fashions, or get ride of some extra mattresses, they took full-page ads in the big dailies.

Now, the area known as Downtown Crossing is literally a hole in the ground, from which no advertising dollars escape.

 

 

 

 

 

This is part of the reason that the Globe and the Herald are shells of their former selves. One of their most important revenue streams simply dried up — and shows no signs of ever gushing again.

Footnote: a whimper-out to Globe staff photographer Suzanne Kreiter for having her photo chosen to illustrate today’s story. The last-century photo dates from the heyday: 1988.

 

 

 

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