Back to the New York Times

Yep - next assignment is to dissect a day or so of Politico.com. That will be fun. But in the meantime I am still blogging.

If you saw my post Watching Giants Struggle, you heard me talk about how so many in Journalism just don't get what is really happening these days. It was so refreshing to read a NYT journalist who DOES get it. Got this through the Romenesko link on Carlos' class blog. The headline was The media's become a kind of reverse roach motel. (Headlines are more important than ever in Internet writing, BTW. But they have to be even shorter and punchier than in a 7 column spread newspaper - this one was an exception but it worked). Well it did the trick and I read the article. Fantastic.

'Media Has Become a Kind of Reverse Roach Motel ...'

And Other Thoughts From New York Times Columnist David Carr on the Pursuit of Truth ... and What Happens Next

Straight to some talking points from David Carr: and his interviewer Simon Dumenco, media columnist at Advertising Age.

Carr: Well, if you're asking if I was surprised, the answer is yeah. In terms of the wholesale collapse -- the combination of secular and cyclical changes, to the point where the question is not who will survive but will the whole thing burn down and be replaced by something else? -- I did not anticipate that. I find it shocking...

Carr: If I didn't fundamentally believe in The New York Times building and leveraging its way through, I couldn't stick with it. I think the fact that we've got 20 million uniques, 3 million of whom are there all the time, that's gotta be a business. Part of what I wonder about is people keep saying, "Well, when things get better ..." What if the combination of secular and cyclical change that we have -- what if this is normal? What if all the money that was sloshing around was in fact from the housing bubble, from easy credit, and that credit does not return? I think that's a much more difficult and scary problem. I haven't seen the money coming back yet.

Dumenco: Yeah, I don't think it's coming back. Certainly a lot of the sloshing within media was just the pure, unadulterated monopoly money -- monopoly-power money, which is gone or going away.

Carr: Who benefited from that monopoly? It wasn't just the owners....

Carr: Yeah. It's like, what will The New York Times be? Will they need me? Will they want me? I just think things are gonna be shifting rapidly. They make it clear that in the current paradigm they value what I do, but I think things will change very rapidly.

You have to read the whole thing -

My analysis - I'll do it in bullets

• When you have the web traffic like the NYT does - there is a business there. I'm an internet guy. Traffic like that is "to die for."
• You gotta get rid of the spoiled-ness. Carr has it right, the media may not have been paid like kings, but they lived like kings. They were a privileged class. It was a bubble that has burst.
• The business paradigm was built upon newspapers, television, and other types of media holding a monopoly on public communications. That monopoly is gone.
• Summary. There IS a business there. A huge one. It will not be the old monopoly recovered. The media class will not revert to its previous privileged status (at least in Manhattan). The business will change. The people in it must change. Those who do not, will leave and probably not return.

These guys get it.