There are no more experts

It looks like some hedge funds are looking to get into the NYTimes business. It seems to need some help what with its ad and classified revenues down quite a bit. They’re already cutting 100 newsroom jobs, but with the hedgefunds looking to get on the board it seems they need to do more, much centering around their online strategy.

So, naturally, vc’s had something to say. I was curious to read the piece with some suggested fixes for the company. First get rid of everything except the paper and the website (and maybe About.com) and put in new management. Ok, seems kinda standardy fare, I don’t know if it’s a good or bad idea.

But then we get into the mad Web2.0 talk…

I’d make the NY Times all about their audience. Let the people who read the paper have a much larger role in the content that gets published, both online and offline.

Really? Like turn the website into digg and have the paper be an extension of that? That’s going to fix these problems? Moving on with his final point…

The best thing about the NY Times is their readers. The only way they can fix their problems is by leveraging them as the other half of their newsroom.

Let’s look at this statement. Does this mean that the NYTimes’ content sucks? Or perhaps it means that other papers’ readers suck? Beyond that, don’t they have their readership due to their editorial work? Just because I read the Times and you read the Times doesn’t mean I give a rat’s ass about what you think - maybe I do, but I’m there for the editorial voice of the paper more than your voice.

Now I’m not saying that I don’t think there’s value in community, there is. But this overvaluation of adding in community - of turning your audience into the “other half of the newsroom” just doesn’t make sense to me. In any online community 90% of the work is going to be done by 10% or less of the group. It’s prone to gaming, it’s prone to least common denominatoring and seems to me to be somewhat the opposite of the journalistic goals of the paper.

I think that community is valuable, giving everyone a voice is valuable. But I still believe that there is also value in an editorial decision, in having paid experts providing their own voice to you. Everything does not have to fully leverage the wisdom of the crowds. And leveraging said wisdom does not automatically make something better or more interesting. I think this is especially true in journalism - we already have plenty of citizen journalism. The echo chamber is chock full of voices already. It is worthwhile to have entities that stand apart from the echo chamber and make it’s decisions with the wisdom of the few.

I’m probably wrong about all this, maybe the only way for the Times to continue as a profitable entity would be to do exactly as suggested. Hell, there’s a reason those VC’s have billions to give away and I’m sitting here blogging in the dark. But it seems to me that going down that route makes the Times something less than what it is now - it loses it’s nytimes-iness as its crowd increasingly chooses its editorial content and it becomes more and more like everything else out there.

Mar 4th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: web2.0