Could the stars be aligning for a Google-N.Y. Times merger? Dealscape — This sort of thing actually makes sense.
As the New York Times Co. is negotiating with lenders over its debt, speculation has been floating around the blogosphere, pushing the premise that Google Inc. should acquire the beleaguered Gray Lady. The thesis or, rumor, as some would put it has been around since the beginning of the year, with SpliceToday on Thursday reintroducing the idea of the unorthodox union of the stalwart of old media with the scion of new media.
But the possibility of this dream hookup is just fantasy because the owners of the Times — the Sulzberger family — for now, seem emboldened to hold on to the company for as long as it can. The Sulzbergers, however, are living on borrowed time as the family is facing pressure on all fronts to save the company, which is hemorrhaging as the slow economy has decimated its advertising and subscription revenue. Already, the media company took the extreme move of borrowing $250 million from their newly built headquarters pictured, but that seems to be a temporary band-aid on what very well could be a mortal wound.
God, that would be a waste of money.
For years the internet buzzmakers say print media is archaic, and the internet is the future. Now they say maybe their superheros will make it theirs and it will be a great thing. ROFL. Idiots.
I doubt if it would be what it cost. Google would only benifit by putting it on line and they can do their own on line.
There is also the simple fact that most of these organizations print media and TV media alike are more liberal than most potential readers/viewers which is why fox is making money and so many others are way down in the ratings.
I’m not asking you to agree with fox’s politics. I know most of the people here don’t. I’m pointing out a business choice.
The views presented by some of the people who post news articles here have also done the same thing for the number of readers looking at this site.
If you aren’t a liberal athiest you don’t feel welcome here. While this no doubt correctly reflected the views of the poster I’d say it may have cut the number of people looking at this blog by at least 50% and that means money bleeped off.
Era of the monopolies in skewed news is over. Now everyone can skew the news their way and have fun doing it,… Good by NYT, as Google will not waste their money on nothing…
What Murdoch wants, Murdoch gets.
The NYT has screwed this country enough – let it die a peaceful death.
#3 – deow
>>If you aren’t a liberal athiest you don’t
>>feel welcome here.
Hey, I may be liberal, but I’m sure as shit not an Atheist. And I feel nothing but the most profound love and acceptance here on dvorak dot org slash blog.
#6 – SnotPoop
>>The NYT has screwed this country enough – let
>>it die a peaceful death.
The NYT is the cornerstone of free press in America. Sure, they make a mistake sometimes, like when they let Judith Miller lead them down the garden path to Iraq, her with her yellow-cake uranium and WMDs and all the other bullshit, but they ‘fess up when they’ve muffed up.
Who would you propose as a replacement for the NYT as America’s premier news source? Faux Spews? World Net Daily? Jewish World Review? The Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times?
Borrowing money with the headquarters that they built by using eminent domain laws to take the land away from some small businesses. They should be made to give that land back in any bankruptcy or merger.
@ Mr Mustard
No one can PROPOSE a replacement. The market will decide who will replace it buy buying their product. No one proposed that the NYT goes out of business. It is just going to happen because their reporting is crap and they don’t report the truth. They try to create stories and slant them in untruthful ways. People see through this, don’t buy the product, and thus they will die a long or slow death depending on how much of of the fortune the Sulzberges are willing to lose in order to keep spewing their propaganda.
#10 – Thermo
>>t is just going to happen because their
>>reporting is crap and they don’t report the
>>truth. They try to create stories and slant
>>them in untruthful ways.
Hey, don’t be so hard on them just because they got sucked in by discredited Judith Miller’s dishonorable reporting, and initially supported the war in Iraq. They admitted their error on that one.
Still, when people around the world want to know what’s happening in today’s world, they overwhelmingly go to the NYT. You don’t see Google trying to buy WND or JWR or Faux Spews, do you? They might as well throw their money into a paper shredder.
let the times just go down in piece
Market forces at work. Produce a product that people don’t want to buy & the business will fail.
Great management decision – build an expensive new building while profits are diving.
Forget politics and breaking news for a minute.
It’s extremely hard to find a newspaper with writing anywhere near the quality of NY Times. The variety of subjects and the depth of the articles are unmatched.
Of course, you have to be able to read in order to appreciate it.
What does Google, or anybody, need with a bankrupt dinosaur?
It’s extremely hard to find a newspaper with writing anywhere near the quality of NY Times. The variety of subjects and the depth of the articles are unmatched.
It may be written well, but it is often bias, inaccurate or incomplete when covering politics.
This is especially true when it comes to foreign policy in general and the middle east in particular, as evidenced by the Judith Miller disaster.
This is due to both the ownership and the market that the primarily serve – Bageltown.
And yes, not all Jews want to bias our foreign policy towards Israel, but enough of them do to influence it tremendously, and often against the national interests of the US.
#14 – Stu
>>It’s extremely hard to find a newspaper with
>>writing anywhere near the quality of NY
>>Times. The variety of subjects and the depth
>>of the articles are unmatched.
That’s exactly right. And the fact that they have some liberal op-ed columnists is enough to get the tightie-rightie wingnuts’ panties in quite a bunch.
It burns them beyond the point of endurance that none of the extreme right-wing publications (JWR, WND, etc.) or even the rightie-leaning ones (Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times) can’t hold a candle to the writing and analysis of the NYT.
The business model of paper papers may be going the way of the Apple IIe, but if there’s one left standing, it will be the NYT.
Mustard, I’d rather not have one source for every broadcast and radio news in the country.
Hey Mustard – “You don’t see Google trying to buy WND or JWR or Faux Spews, do you?” I don’t see Google trying to buy the NYT, either. Just suggestions that they should. In fact, I think Google is smart enough not to make such a bad business decision.
Can you say AOL-Time Warner?
Oh, they might throw the Times a bone. Say something like buying their archives. But, buy the company? Extremely doubtful.
#18 – Lyin’ Mike
>>Mustard, I’d rather not have one source for
>>every broadcast and radio news in the
>>country.
Me neither. And Faux Spews is always good for a laugh, as are WND and JNR.
But if I had to get my news from only one source, it would be the NYT. And other than the far right wingnut fringe, most people feel the same way.
Old print dinosaurs like the NY Times are the prime example of too much brick and mortar, in a century scaling back on such castles of industry. While everyone else is downsizing and outsourcing. These major institutions of NY continue to retail their skyscrapers for some sort of pride, or for their investors’ confidence. It was the same with the WTC. An obsolete relic. With today’s connectivity, such businesses could be run out of a few smaller, and lower cost buildings, scattered around the country. But NY businesses (and perhaps Chicago too) have this “Us against the world” philosophy (or paranoia). That keeps everything they do all bottled up in those huge buildings, to the bitter end. And that may be coming sooner than they thought.
I’d rather have the nightly news broadcasts and the radio news guys get their news is some way other than pick up the Times and read what’s on it on the air.
An editorial board slanting is nothing new ore even bad. It’s when that slant affects the choice and slant of so-called “new” stories that it’s a problem. That slant has been apparent in the NYT for decades.
When it folds, that will be a good thing as the lefties will have a harder time pushing their agenda – they will no longer have a single point of propaganda dissemination.
The Tribune would be a better deal.
A newspaper is simply one means of delivering news content. But there is more.
Ten or twenty years ago I would have said:
The difference between print and broadcast is often the depth and length of stories–and usually the quality. When the TV news covers something at 6 or 11 it is often a 30 second version of the basic facts. Then its on to the “Wednesday’s Child” segment featuring the cute kid of the week. The longer version of the same story that appears in the next day’s paper usually has a much stronger and more lasting impact.
Today there is the Internet–which is bringing far more readers around the world to newspapers’ content but in an unprofitable way–and many cable news outlets which sometimes offer long-form in-depth coverage and analysis which traditional broadcast media outlets–CBS’ 60 minutes aside–would never have the resources or viewers’ attention span to cover. The problem is that these same cable news outfits often give undue attention to a story because it is “breaking” than it really deserves. A helicopter following a car chase that will never be mentioned again after its conclusion is an obvious example.
Print media is very, very expensive to produce and distribute. My newspaper has a circulation of over 9,000 and about 20,000 readers. It costs about $2,000 per issue just to print and distribute. My website has every issue we have ever produced available–so it has all the same content. It costs me about $100 per year.
Here is the problem.
All of the past competition newspapers have historically faced and weather offered arguably lower quality content. Radio, TV & early cable news outlets by their nature offered less time per story and thus lower quality for the end user who wanted all the facts. You can print as many pages in a paper as budget and content allow. You can’t add more minutes into an hour. So the newspapers stayed strong and profitable.
The Internet is completely different. It has all the advantages of print publications (and now even their content) and is portable, usually free and allows for random access to any article rather than having to leaf through a paper or wait through a radio or TV program. It’s an increasingly ADHD consumer’s dream.
So the risk for us all is that if all of the papers go down, who will have the money to pay for the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the future? Who will have the resources to pay a reporter or team of reporters to study and investigate the Walter Reed scandal? That story was around since 2004 but never hit traction until a series of front page stories were printed in the Washington Post after an expensive years-long investigation by their permanent investigations unit–ironically started by Bob Woodward who has the luxury of being able to stay on at the Post for $1 per year.
I’m not arguing that we bail out the industry or that dinosaurs should be kept on life support in perpetutity. I do think that someone will figure this whole mess out and find away to allow the high quality content that some of the big papers have produced to survive in this new age–and help protect democracy in the process.
If there is any outfit that has shown the creativity, intelligence and innovative skills to reform the New York Times–and show the rest of us in the industry the way, it might well be Google.
It certainly won’t be “Wednesday’s Child.”
As for the arguments of the editorial slants of various media outlets, it is nothing new. People on the right see Fox News as “mainstream” and hate the New York Times and MSNBC. People on the left see the inverse. Good. Our diversity makes us stronger. That’s what the first amendment is all about. It’s all about equal access to the system. If Matt Drudge can start the most influential news website in the world single-handedly while sitting in his pajamas in his living room with no advertising then so can you.
#23 – Lyin’ Mike
>>I’d rather have the nightly news broadcasts
>>and the radio news guys get their news is
>>some way other than pick up the Times and
>>read what’s on it on the air.
Well, so would I. But how many nightly new and radio guys actually do ANYTHING other than read a 15- or 30-second synopsis of something written somewhere else?
And if they’re going to do that, better that they get it from the Times than from some lackluster (or tainted) source.
It’s not for nothing that there are no Woodwards or Bernsteins at WND, JWR, or Faux Spews. They can’t be bothered with investigative reporting; they just take stuff off the wire services, twist it to reflect their viewpoint for dissemination.
#24 – SnotPoop
>> It’s when that slant affects the choice and
>>slant of so-called “new” stories that it’s a
>>problem.
Aw, would you let it go, SnotPoop? We all know that the Times got sucked in by discredited journalist Judith Miller into supporting Dumbya’s bullshit “intelligence” that formed the foundation for his trophy war in Iraq.
Don’t cast them in the role of right-wing shills just because of that. They apologized for the mistake.
#27, well WND has been running a series that shows Obama’s book was written by Ayers. Then again just like last time with Lewinsky they’ll probably give the Pulitzer to a mainstream reporter who was late to the story.
#29 – Lyin’ Mike
>>well WND has been running a series that shows
>>Obama’s book was written by Ayers.
Hoo boy. If I read it in WND, I’m sure it must be true. Who do they have working on that breaking story, Jerome Corsi? Or did he make such an ass of himself over that “born in Kenya” nonsense that they put another one of their eager cub reporters on the story?
I’m going to have to re-evaluate you, Lyin’ Mike. I thought you read the truth and just lied about it, but if you’re a WND buff, maybe you’re just reading lies and parroting them verbatim. In that case, you may be simply non guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Hmm.
If the deal goes through, you may see a “Beta” below the NYT logo.