Newspapers — slow and in denial

I am a sucker for defunct browser maker Marc Andreessen’s hip-shooting style. Here he is giv­ing both bar­rels to the New York Times. [HT: sans serif]

Andreessen: Take the New York Times. They are slow and they are in denial. After 15 years of the Inter­net, their online divi­sion — though it has been very aggress­ive and well run com­pared to its peers — still rep­res­ents only about 10 per cent of the company’s total rev­enue. And it’s not enough. The core of the busi­ness is collapsing.

What’s going to hap­pen is that print sub­scrip­tions will decline to a point where it’s no longer eco­nom­ic­ally feas­ible to keep the print­ing plants oper­at­ing. They will be shut down. So will the dis­tri­bu­tion networks.

When that hap­pens, the only thing left will be rev­en­ues from the online divi­sions. That won’t be enough to cover news­room costs. There is no way that they have a trans­ition strategy from point A to point B.

SPIEGEL: What would you do differently?

Andreessen: Well, if the news­pa­per com­pan­ies all self-destruct because they have failed to come to grips with this trans­ition, then that’s their prob­lem. The people who made horse car­riages were not the ones who star­ted car companies.

But here’s the point: there is an enorm­ous mar­ket demand for inform­a­tion. It just has to be ful­filled in a way that fits with the tech­no­logy of our times.

It is also going to open up a lot of oppor­tun­it­ies for a new gen­er­a­tion of media com­pan­ies, usu­ally born on the Internet…

SPIEGEL: The World Wide Web has exis­ted for some 15 years now. Has any aspect of it become overwhelming?

Andreessen: Inform­a­tion. I cer­tainly have too much inform­a­tion. It drives me bana­nas. that’s why I have gone on an inform­a­tion diet.

More here, unless you’re dieting.

Tagged as: New York Times