Michael Hirschorn speculates in The Atlantic:
At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”
Poynter’s Rick Edmonds disagrees.
“The [NYTimes] scenario is not the least bit plausible.” Hirschorn, he says, “is a high-concept idea guy, not a financial journalist” who should have been rescued by the Atlantic’s editing team from “a series of howlers.”
Fred Wilson, using a focus group of one — his wife! — says that even as a daily reader of the print paper, she checks blogs throughout the day and NOT NYTimes.com. From this he concludes:
First, the mainstream newspaper reader is just making this transition to intraday news consumption now. Second, they will not blindly follow their offline brand loyalty when they go online. And most importantly, publishing news online is fundamentally different from publishing news offline.
Later he quotes one of Hirschorn’s options for the survival of the Times:
In this scenario, nytimes.com would begin to resemble a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting. This combination has allowed the HuffPo to digest the news that matters most to its readers at minimal cost, while it focuses resources in the highest-impact areas. What the HuffPo does not have, at least not yet, is a roster of contributors who can set agendas, conduct in-depth investigations, or break high-level news. But the post-print Times still would.
This is Hirschorn’s conclusion:
Ultimately, the death of The New YorkTimes—or at least its print edition—would be a sentimental moment, and a severe blow to American journalism. But a disaster? In the long run, maybe not.
Me, I think definitely not. John Battelle says “[the Times] will continue in the digital age, but it will have to pass new tests of value before it can survive.” He agrees with Hirschorn “that the model of journalism itself is due for an overhaul, and I cannnot agree more. In fact I’d go way, way further than he’s gone.” He has more in the first in what he promises to be a series of ThinkOutLoud posts on the future of print and journalism.
For his part, Andrew Sullivan loves his morning coffee and ginger snap ritual:
There is something deeply precious about letting expert editors guide you through the news of the day. I find and read stories serendipitously I would never find online. And I read them through because I trust the editors to have done their job. Yes, you wince and splutter from time to time. But most of the time, even the NYT’s critics will concede they also learn a huge amount. Under Bill Keller, I have fallen in love with the paper all over again. And I hope they figure out a way to keep it afloat.
I’m confident they will. Sullivan also quotes Clay Shirky in the Guardian:
The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It’s like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union – nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way
Meanwhile, in Seattle, David McCumber, managing editor of the Post-Intelligencer, reacting to a King TV report that the paper could be sold or closed, told his newsroom last night:
“If this is going on — and I don’t know that it is — it’s going on at a level that’s far above me, and nobody has seen fit to clue me in. I think it’s a bunch of rumor. You look at the state of this business — it wouldn’t surprise me if something was going on, but I have no knowledge of what that something is.”
That via Cory Bergman:
According to the anonymously-sourced report, Hearst doesn’t believe the paper will sell and would then close it down, leaving the Seattle Times as the remaining daily paper. This is a surprise for many Seattleites — not because one of the two dailies here may be going away, but because it’s the PI and not the financially-struggling Times.
Next question: What would become of SeattlePI.com, the most popular local news website in town?