The New York Times, the Grand Old Lady, is in trouble.
Compared to other dailies the NYTimes circulation is strong, not declining. But compared to other nationals, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, it is substantially falling behind. Half of the NYTimes circulation is national. The more national gains the more local circulation looses.
I’ll ignore the wrong explanations and get right to the right one: nepotism. “Junior”, as the CEO of the NYTimes, is properly called, is the fourth generation of his family running the business. His cousin is in charge of the Times owned Herald Trib in Europe.
This is not the only nepotism in a major U.S. corporation. One big flop happened at Motorola where the third generation finally got booted upstairs and the company was saved. At Ford the fourth generation is still mucking around and could bring disaster. Fidelity is in the third or fourth generation (depending on your definition of grandpa’s role) and I expect no growth. Fidelity is much like a big bank, inertia will carry it a long way in spite of weak management.
“Junior” the CEO of the NYTimes made the right decision to go national
and could make the wrong decision to charge for Internet access unless he does it in a unique and brilliant way. Junior has dismissed criticism of the Times coverage being too liberal and too mean spirited as the function of being an “urban” newspaper.
No Junior, look at your two competitors. When you look at the front page of the WSJ or the USA you don’t cringe and say: “the world is going to hell in a hand basket.” That is what the NYTimes conveys every day. The daily cringe factor has nothing to do with urban anything and nothing to do with good reporting. It has to do with the core of lefty bias: pessimism, misery and hopeless ideas of a discarded past.
Junior, turn the paper over to managers based on merit, not genes, and let them create a great corporation.