Print’s future fascinates me, and so I devoured “The Gossip Mill” by Rebecca Mead in the October 19, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
(Alloy Entertainment President Leslie) Morgenstein has much less confidence in the economic power of books. “I do fundamentally believe that publishing is not an expanding business,” he says. “It is contracting — even our corner of it, which has been very vibrant in the past few years. I don’t think long term there’s going to be sustainable growth there.” As a result, the Alloy executives spend as much time thinking about ideas for television and movies as they do for books, and consider their book ideas in terms of their viability as television and film franchises.
That’s #1.
#2. Recently, I attended an industry conference regarding content syndication (click here for my thirty minute monologue), and last week wondered if there were lessons that The New York Times might learn from content syndicators.
#3. Are there ways to address the why of publishing’s contraction that might stave off a quick Times death?
Which is to say: print is in part going bye bye because humans have squirrel-brains and applications such as twitter enable our inner squirrel-hood. We like bumper stickers and slogans in 140 characters or less rather than complex book-length discourse that lacks a pithy takeaway. (Related: politicos used to deliver long-winded speeches using complex grammar; citizens today just like stuff like CHANGE, HOPE, and READ MY LIPS.)
So given these three insights
- Books are dying but television and film aren’t
- The money in content is in its syndication, not its creation
- Humans are squirrels
what could The New York Times do?
Thinking “aloud” …
- What if The New York Times used its own headlines to write television and film scripts? Truth is better than fiction; why not get some folks to brainstorm and draft some screenplays? The Chinese dude workin’ two jobs and taking an 11 p.m. Shakespeare class at Bunker Hill community college … has an accident with the snarky fashion reviewer who hates on JCPenney … and both get stuck in an emergency room and begin to discuss the health care debate while waiting for care …
- What if The New York Times repurposed its headlines for the center spread of AM New York? AMNY would pay the Times for the right, they’d share ad revenues for the ads in the center spread, AMNY could raise its other ad rates because folks like me would choose AMNY over Metro NY every day of the week as soon as they had Times blurbs in the center of the page. Plus, scanning the print blurbs would likely drive me to the Times website as soon as I hit the office … which brings me to …
- What if The New York Times sold a quarter version of its $2.00 daily? Not a quarter-size — but a 25 cent version of the top headlines in a smaller, digest size (think: those magazines at the airport, all cute and handy and 7″x9″). I like the tangibility of the Times but unless I have 90 minutes to kill on the regular (I don’t) I can’t justify $2.00/day — but I could deal with 25 cents and that’s about all I have time to scan every day. Plus — it’ll likely drive me to the web to read the full-length versions of abridged content.
Are these ideas implausible? Have they already been tried?
And more importantly — anyone else have any ideas?
It would be a tragedy if The New York Times were to go the way of Sundays without commerce.
Photograph of Gutenbergs taken in New Haven, Connecticut - November 2006
