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Feb

29

Billionaire techie starts NYT newspaper death watch


This blog post is for Jeff Hess of Have Coffee Will Write.  Some of the first blog conversations Jeff and had were about newspapers.  We’re still here, the newspapers are still here, and I bet Jeff and I haven’t changed our positions.

Here’s Fortune magazine’s story about Netscape founder (who, according to the piece, isn’t exactly in mourning over its demise; he sold it for $4.2 billion to AOL 10 years ago per Fortune) Marc Andreessen (his blog is here and his latest venture is Ning – would it be an interesting add-on to BFD or MTB?), who has started a newspaper death watch for the New York Times.

From the Fortune article:

“I can’t take it anymore,” he wrote on his blog (blog.pmarca.com). “I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building.” [here's the post that inaugurated the watch] The piece goes on to rip apart the Times’ business strategy top to bottom, attacking everything from the techno-illiteracy of its board of directors (which boasts experts in marsupials and snack cakes but almost no expertise in the Internet) to its recent per-copy price hike. “When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price,” he snarked. (He’s not the only one gunning for the Times. A coalition of hedge funds just bought up 10% of the company and wants to install four of its own candidates on the board.)

…

So what would he do if he were running the Times? Easy, he says. Kill the print product immediately and deliver the base line of news online only. “Take acute pain now in order to avoid years of chronic pain,” he says. “Basic rule of thumb: Be on offense, not on defense.” And the offense? Graft social networking features onto the online Times, of course.

With Ning, of course.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:48 pm February 29th, 2008 in Business, Media, Tech 

Comments

4 Responses to “Billionaire techie starts NYT newspaper death watch”

  1. 1 Jeff Hess on March 1st, 2008 10:12 am

    Shabbat shalom Jill,

    Yep. I’m still in the same place I was in 1981 when I took my first class on VideoText (that’s what we called the news on the Internet back in the stone age).

    It’s all about the delivery system. We don’t use pony express riders anymore to move the mail. Why the feck do we continue to believe that using paper and ink (or time-bound broadcast systems) to move the news makes any sense?

    We need ever good reporter and editor that the New York Times has. What we don’t need is the printing press.

    B’shalom,

    Jeff

  2. 2 MY COMMENTS… on March 1st, 2008 10:15 am

    [...] Billionaire techie starts NYT newspaper death watch 0759 McCain… distances self from Hagee… [...]

  3. 3 Jill Miller Zimon on March 1st, 2008 10:15 am

    Jeff, I think that’s very fair. I would agree with that. BUT…I do like the idea of a newspaper as a physical thing I take with me to read while I sit in my car waiting for my kid to come out of school or whatever. So, not surprisingly, I’m undecided. lol

  4. 4 J. Rowsey on March 1st, 2008 11:19 am

    This is a very interesting post. I tend to agree with Jill that I like the idea of physically holding a newspaper in my hand or for that matter a book. I’ve not been able to get into the whole e-book thing yet. Having said that, I did cancel my subscription to the Columbus Dispatch, but that had more to do with the lack of interesting journalism going on in that paper.

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