Not That, or How, But: Why is the NYT Killing Itself?

Posted on 29 Dec 2009 20:37 UTC

Today’s interview with torturer John Yoo might be the New York Times’ crowning embarrassment. They let him get away with mumbly one-liners (“As a lawyer, I had a client.”) and jokes about Birkenstocks, when they should have been nailing him to the wall — figuratively, of course; only he would literally nail people to walls. Instead, Yoo turns the interview around and uses it as a way to undermine the opposition by letting the Times exposing themselves as incompetent.

Fake Steve Jobs also makes the point that the Times simply does not know, or cannot know, what is going on:

This democracy is ours to make or break, and we will make it with news media that holds both the private and public sectors accountable. Why is the mainstream media, especially a so-called “liberal” bastion like the Times, abdicating its role? Why did NYT change the course of history for the worse by sitting on the warrantless wiretapping story for over a year?

In any case, they clearly are abdicating. They have fumbled the “paper of record” ball, and have ceded news and investigative primacy to new players: John Stewart’s fake news is at least as real as the NYT’s, and blogs across the spectrum scoop them on political, cultural, and technological issues on a regular-enough basis that it’s getting embarrassing. There is still good stuff in the NYT, of course; I happen to like Olivia Judson’s, Frank Rich’s, and Paul Krugman’s columns. But the good writers will need to find new homes when the NYT finally goes out of business. If they are smart they will leave before the end while the getting is good. (Why is Eric Lichtblau still there?)

I hypothesize that, even after all this time — it’s been 15+ years since the web got really going — institutions like the Deathly Grey Lady still don’t understand the internet. Consider their front page, which weighs in at around 1 MiB on average. (You can test this yourself with my httprof tool or other nice tools like Firebug and YSlow.) Given that nytimes.com is ranked near 100 globally in Alexa’s traffic measurements, that means their huge page size is costing them tons and tons of money. Nobody who understood the internet would pay that much money to serve such a bloated, cramped site.

(Why do I call it “cramped”? Here is some good discussion about the issue of “the fold” as it pertains, or does not pertain, to web design: UX Magazine on Google’s new tool based on measurements of real visitors’ browsers, and Boxes and Arrows blasts the myth of the fold. Google describes their fold tool.

Also consider superior news interfaces such as, of course, news.google.com. Look how easy it is to read. Look how efficiently they use visual space and bandwidth. Notice how fast it loads. Google knows how much bandwidth costs, and they know how their readers read their site. Is it any wonder they have been able to make metric shit-tons of money with a business model that is essentially the same as that of a newspaper?)

We need good journalism. I would like to see the NYT survive, but on their current trajectory they are scheduled to fade away around 2015. Outlets such as these might be contenders to eclipse the Times soon:

NYT has missed their chance to be as rich and as powerful as Google — they could have been — but they might still turn things around.

If they want to.

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