Will Google Buy The New York Times?
Andrew Sargus Klein
SpliceTodya
Or does it make more philanthropic and financial sense to buy the AP? Either way, someone needs to bail out print media.
On The New York Times’ book blog Paper Cuts, Barry Gewen recently reviewed One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost. We learn that of the 6900 spoken languages, 69 percent of the world speaks four of them. Just as species of animals reach the end of the line, so do languages—more often than not it is not a matter natural selection or choice. Gewen writes:
When a small population gives up its language voluntarily (as opposed to compulsorily), it does so to become part of a larger or more powerful community. To preserve such peoples, we’d have to isolate them or maintain their languages through some other artificial, even coercive, means.
The point is not lost when applied to the very real dismantling of paper media. The Tribune Co.—piloted by Sam Zell and owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun, among others—is on the verge of collapse. The New York Times, the media world’s onetime bastion, is frantically circling the wagons as it borrows against its own assets to protect its brand new building. As the paper seeks to cut loose dead weight, it’s finding that brand amputation costs more in the short run than the former assets are currently worth. The paper has declined 70 per cent in value over the past five years. It’s a grim situation. (I wonder how many New Yorkers see the Times’ stake in the Boston Red Sox as the metaphysical culprit…) Media pundits have been singing print’s swan song for years now. And that song is blaring as America’s storied dailies, weeklies and magazines shudder to a halt, one fiscal quarter at a time. The business models cannot support the medium, as the Internet has so deftly shown—and expedited.
(More here.)
SpliceTodya
Or does it make more philanthropic and financial sense to buy the AP? Either way, someone needs to bail out print media.
On The New York Times’ book blog Paper Cuts, Barry Gewen recently reviewed One Thousand Languages: Living, Endangered, and Lost. We learn that of the 6900 spoken languages, 69 percent of the world speaks four of them. Just as species of animals reach the end of the line, so do languages—more often than not it is not a matter natural selection or choice. Gewen writes:
When a small population gives up its language voluntarily (as opposed to compulsorily), it does so to become part of a larger or more powerful community. To preserve such peoples, we’d have to isolate them or maintain their languages through some other artificial, even coercive, means.
The point is not lost when applied to the very real dismantling of paper media. The Tribune Co.—piloted by Sam Zell and owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun, among others—is on the verge of collapse. The New York Times, the media world’s onetime bastion, is frantically circling the wagons as it borrows against its own assets to protect its brand new building. As the paper seeks to cut loose dead weight, it’s finding that brand amputation costs more in the short run than the former assets are currently worth. The paper has declined 70 per cent in value over the past five years. It’s a grim situation. (I wonder how many New Yorkers see the Times’ stake in the Boston Red Sox as the metaphysical culprit…) Media pundits have been singing print’s swan song for years now. And that song is blaring as America’s storied dailies, weeklies and magazines shudder to a halt, one fiscal quarter at a time. The business models cannot support the medium, as the Internet has so deftly shown—and expedited.
(More here.)
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