Times Fall Apart
Michael Malone writes a positively devastating autopsy of the New York Times. Oh, the paper is still technically alive, but the fire sale of every share of NYT stock by Morgan Stanley yesterday is a sure sign that the Times is a dead paper walking, so to speak.
Boom! And down goes the biggest newspaper name of all.
As you may have read, yesterday brokerage giant Morgan Stanley dumped its entire stake — $183 million worth — in the New York Times, in which it was the second largest shareholder. Not surprisingly, Times stock immediately slumped, bottoming at a nearly 3 percent drop to $18.28 — the lowest it has been in a decade.
The actual damage is probably even larger than that. The Morgan Stanley sell-off has been expected for some time now. Ever since April, after Hassam Elmasry, managing director of Morgan's Investment Management Group failed in his attempt to challenge the Sulzberger family's iron grip on the Times, the market has been expecting Morgan to pull out — and it is probably no coincidence that the stock has been in downward slide ever since.
Malone does an excellent job of explaining how - and how very badly - the times went wrong. A series of disastrous blunders and a total inability to grasp the realities of the internet and the new media have destroyed the Gray Lady.
Would this decline in reputation have occurred without the rise of the Internet? To some degree, yes. You can mark the turn in the Times' reputation from the early 1990s, when it began to put, on the front page, an increasing number of opinion pieces and feature reporting (most infamously, a glimpse into the apartment of William Kennedy Smith's purported rape victim).
At first, this was dismissed as a mere pandering to the changing tastes of a readership raised on television and gonzo reporting. But it was a first glimpse of the pandering to a supposedly hipper, more sophisticated audience that would become pandemic across the Times' pages under the threat of the Internet age.
At about the same time, I got an early glimpse of how the Times would mishandle the technology side of its business as well. One day, several years after I'd stopped writing my column for the paper, I received a letter from the Times demanding that I retroactively sign over all electronic rights to my stories and columns on file at the newspaper.
Then came the disaster of "Times Select" - a roaring failure that probably ruined most of the columnists that fell victim to it. Their voice and importance has been diminished as surely as the Times' credit rating. And the outright lies told to readers. Read it all. Malone is not triumphant here - he's unhappy that it has come to this. Had the Times played to its long-held strengths and become even better reported and more objective, it could have been a force to be reckoned with. Instead, it is on life support and sinking fast. It is only a matter of time until the plug is pulled.
By feeblemind, Thursday, 18 October , 2007 @ 9:51 pm
I have been watching the graveyard spin that the NYT has been in for some time. I will take grim satisfaction when this seditious American company finally crashes and burns. It will be interesting to see who then comes along to pick up the pieces. Will it be Dubai? China? George Soros? Who knows?
By Steve J., Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 12:49 am
And the outright lies told to readers.
Judith Miller
By daveinboca, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 1:59 am
Judith Miller is a convent nun compared to the Lying Collection of Second-Raters like Friedman & Dowd and the C-List Third-Rate Failures like failed economist Paul Krugboy and failed broadway critic Frank Rich.
David Brooks and occasionally Kristol are first-rate, but the quality of the publication has plummeted over the last fifteen years, as the Malone article elucidates.
Slowly circling in the porcelain bowl, the Tiimes is receding from view in a downward spiral.
By Neo, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 8:52 am
I thought this summed it up perfectly ..
And you can’t claim “all the news that’s fit to print” when you neglect to notice that an American soldier in Iraq just won the Medal of Honor. In the old days, if the Times didn’t cover it, it didn’t happen. That insulation is long gone: if the Times doesn’t cover it, the blogosphere will –
By sam, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 1:50 pm
I give the NYT about a year before the board of directors institute a change of management. No responsible board would allow the problem to go on to total collapse.
More likely a change of management, selling it, or taking it private.
By quilly mammoth, Friday, 19 October , 2007 @ 3:24 pm
The board won’t make a change in management because of the special stock that Pinchy and his family own. Which makes them “own” the board. That’s why Hassam Elmasry sold the stock. No hope.
And I find extreme humor in the Lame Lefty Lament about Judith Miller. Jayson Blair is just the tip of the iceberg.