Notes of Concern….
Jack Blair
Saying Goodbye to the "Gray Lady"
“The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded in 1851 and published in New York City. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States, ‘The Gray Lady’—named for its staid appearance and style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record. The Times is owned by The New York Times Company, which publishes 18 other newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. The company's chairman is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896.”
-Wikipedia
I have read The New York Times for as long as I can remember. It is by no means the only paper I read, but I consider it factual, reliable and trustworthy.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is now at the head of the Times organization. A number of years ago Arthur and I were on a white river rafting trip on the Green River which runs from Vernal, Utah, to Dinosaur National Monument, and then through some of Utah's most rugged and remote landscape...before finally meeting up with the Colorado River.
You learn a lot about a fellow when you are working together to keep a small raft from flipping in the rapids. You also learn a lot about people when you are cooking all your meals by an open fire and sleeping in the woods.
Young Arthur is a very bright, well educated and articulate young man. He followed in the footsteps of his father. He has a natural love of the environment and open spaces, a keen interest in the less fortunate, and a strong need to return the family paper to the power and influence it once enjoyed. His family has been the moving force behind The Times forever. Arthur seemed to me then to be well prepared for eventual leadership of the family paper.
Arthur ascended the throne at the Times as a very young man. Following one’s father is always, at best, a difficult assignment. To follow him into the great recessionary period we have today plus the competition presented by the Internet, is a daunting task. When Arthur was named publisher I worried that he was still young for such responsibilities.
He has faced an incredibly difficult tenure. Major players in the stock of The Times have attempted, without success, to pry loose the family hold on the organization. Some of these investment banks have simply cashed out their holdings. Others decided to stay and continue trying to change the management structure.
When one family has such a huge stake in any organization, and many of the generations are living off their stock dividends, it becomes extremely difficult to explain the adverse change in their bank and investment accounts. Imagine the pressure Athur Sulzberger must be under.
Investors have questioned whether a non-Sulzberger executive might be in the best interests of the newspaper and the paper’s stockholders. So far, the family has remained tight and refused any such suggestion. A change in management is impossible the way the stock ownership plan is currently written. The family has the controlling shares.
We are dealing here with a difference in perception. The world has changed remarkably. Newspapers are not only in competition with one another, but with news services and the Internet. Readers can get their news more quickly by simply logging on to their computers, or even their cell phones.
Any newspaper that wishes to remain in business must be mindful of these changes and be willing and able, to accommodate change.
I refer you to the Wikipedia definition above. The old “Gray Lady” does not seem able to change. Like many people, and organizations, change is coming hard to the Times. Arthur may very well be the last member of the family to operate The New York Times.
Investors know that for The Times to survive, change is essential.
The old “Gray Lady” likes things the way they were.
So news organizations have chronicled the agonies at The Times: the dwindling ad revenue, the staff cuts and the ever-smaller circulation.
If The Times was to have any real chance of surviving they surely need to depend on other “gray heads” who actually prefer holding a newspaper. Readers like myself who are not ready to give up the real paper for news online.
We are an aging group and we won’t be able to sustain newspapers forever but we are a group whose support The New York Times should not wish to loose.
That said, a few weeks ago I was speaking to a good friend who is equally dedicated to holding a paper while reading it. We lamented the diminishing size of The New York Times. And we commented on how much less we were getting for our money.
On Sunday, May 24, 2009 the concern became personal.
Tucked into my very thin copy of the Sunday New York Times was a letter from Ms. Yasmin Namini. Ms. Namini is senior vice president for marketing and circulation at The Times and she was writing me a letter telling me that The Times was raising subscription rates.
On Monday, May 25, 2009, I politely responded to Ms. Namini telling her that she wasn’t raising my subscription rate because I would no longer be a subscriber. I have a hunch that Ms. Namini may be getting a lot of mail with a similar message.
Fortunately, we have local papers that meet my needs.
In the changing world of national information there are no large papers that can tell me about what is happening around my town. For that, I depend on, as did my own parents, the locally owned and operated newspapers.
If you want to know which new store is opening, who is celebrating a seminal birthday, what honors have come to our town, or what time a local theater might be showing a film you want to see; if you want to know what vegetable is on sale at the grocery this week and who is running a special on sweet corn, you want to pick up the local paper.
The local paper will celebrate with you when your child or grandchild does something special in school or grieve with you when a loved one passes.
You will find none of this information on your internet. Frankly, you will not find it in The New York Times either.
So I say a reluctant farewell to a hand held newspaper called The New York Times. I won’t stop reading the Times, but I will learn to live with receiving it FREE online.
I will feed my habit of a handheld newspaper by continuing to buy and read the local one. And I am not unmindful that even my local paper runs syndicated columns and provides me with a synopsis of national and international news, too.
The hard truth is that we need to know what is going on in our world but we also need to be engaged in events in our own hometown.
The bottom line is that we can get all the global news we want on television and online but the news that touches us where we live is still best obtained by reading the local paper
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C. Jackson Blair
blair-notes.blogspot.com
