Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by guessthejuice 2877 days ago
> That’s just insane.

It really isn't. It's why wall street is selling on the news.

> This is a great accomplishment for NYT but I’m worried about what it means for the rest of the industry.

It really isn't. It's why their share price dropped nearly 7% on the news. Their subscriber growth declined. That's not a good thing.

> NYT switching its business model has to be one of the most public and well-executed digital transformations of an old company ever.

NYT "switch" isn't even the most public or well-executed in their own industry. I'd give that nod to news corp and their properties - not that they are doing much better. NYT is playing catch-up.

> In the age of leaders publicly gaslighting, unrefereed global forums of social media which can be bought, and massive concentration of wealth at the top, fewer and consolidated reporting entities will be bad for the republic.

That's true. But the NYT is just as bought as any forum and gaslights as much as any politician. After all the NYT was created by a politician and a banker. It's in their DNA.

I do agree that fewer media entities will be detrimental to the republic. Unfortunately, the NYT along with CNN/WaPo is at the forefront of taking out smaller independent media entities.

1 comments

Throw away account.

If News Corp is the standard we're holding news companies to, we have a serious issue. It's totally disorganized, has no idea what it's trying to achieve and more focused on political outcomes than it is building actual value for shareholders. There is zero leadership, and that leadership there is gets sent to unrelated (but related) companies like Fox.

If it wasn't for a few golden gooses that News Corp acquired decades again, there is no way they could fund their cash burning newspapers.

NYT producing any positive revenue is amazing, i hope they continue to build upon this.

I think he's referring to cases like the Times of London, which went totally paywalled and became profitable in 2014 for the first time since 2001:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/02/tim...

(gotta link to the Guardian for that story because, of course, the Times' own coverage is paywalled)

Yeah fair enough. Having said that, News UK is very much in a completely different landscape. They've for sure made progress in many other ways, but that's significantly in part due to the fact that they're actually much better run businesses (until recently, the last few years have been messy), and not suffering from the kind of competition that they suffer from in the North American market.

I have no personal plans to buy their stock, but I'm not giving investment advice.