Media /// Forward

Over time, Pilhofer adds, this is the role the Times can play: exciting online readers about the value of reportage, engaging them deeply in the Times’ specific brand of journalism—perhaps even so much that they might want to pay for it. If this comes true, it would mean this terrible year was not for nothing: that someday, this hard era would prove the turning point for the paper, the year when it didn’t go down, when it became something better. Pilhofer shrugs and puts his glass back down on the Algonquin table. “I just hope there’s a business model when we get there.

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The Renegades at the New York ‘Times’ - New York Magazine

I love this article, because it clearly points to one of my major professional interests: finding a new and viable business model for newspapers — which henceforth I will try to remember to refer to a news media organizations — even if they look nothing like they do right now. Which seems likely.

Seth Godin concluded today that the only parts of the traditional newspaper we’ll miss are “local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper.”

I’m not so sure about that. Sure sports and comics may be better online, but it’s not all about format. What about the writer whose job it is to travel to exotic places you might never have heard of, or the foreign correspondent who tells you that Judaism is on the rise in Havana?

Would you have come across that information given all the crush of other content that’s out there? More importantly, do you care?