The New York Times announced today that it will seek payment in 2011 for content.
I am happy to pay - I paid for Times Select. I think that this pay or not pay is a distraction though. The larger issue is costs.
The pay online for the Times will bring in money but not enough to pay for the Paper!!!!!
That is the point.
It's the paper that costs too much not that the revenue stream will not be enough.
This is the issue for all of media. The Legacy costs too much.
A hybrid with all the hybrid costs and culture does not work well. Let me remind you of the story of the HMS Inflexible (Real name) and the Dreadnought.
This is HMS Inflexible - Launched in 1876 - 61 years after Trafalgar. This is the New York Times with the paper and the web.
Lets have another look at her in 1896
She was refitted with sails!!. The Captains of the time did not really trust coal and it made the ship dirty.
This was a ship designed to fight at close quarters and to be lead by gentlemen. Those dirty engineers were to be kept in their place.
This is HMS Dreadnought - launched in 1906. She had no secondary armament only big guns and was designed to fight at 10 miles plus. She had steam turbines and could do 22 knots. She could sink the entire German fleet on her own. She was the first ship that was designed all through to be the new.
History reminds us that making the shift from one successful platform to another takes a long time and demands much experimentation. The last thing to change is the culture.
The French had Genoise crossbowmen at Agincourt. But Henry V was prepared to let the peasant British archers fight in the line with the English Knights. The barrier to deploying the new technology is always culture.
The British and French had more and better tanks than the Germans in 1940, but they deployed their tanks like pill boxes. The Germans used the new idea of Blitzkrieg. Technology is NOT the key. It is culture.
So long as the Times and other media organizations put the old first. The best they can do is to be Inflexible.
But a Henry V or Guderian or a Jackie Fisher will come along and blow them away.
The media of the future will have to put the culture of the web as we know it at the apex of its power and inside all that it does. Nothing else will work.
This means that the paper must be much smaller and that those who run the Times have to be from the web side.
A way of doing this will be to cut the Times in two from a portfolio perspective. Put all the costs related into the paper into the paper and all the direct revenue from the paper into the paper. All the web revenue and costs into the new bucket. You can do that now - it's an accounting exercise.
Then look at the ROI.
My bet is that the Times will end up as a national weekly paper. The rest of the Times will be on the web.
When the Times does this - the game will have changed as it did in 1906 when Dreadnought launched and every warship in the world was made obsolete.
