David Warsh: Two developments in big newspapers economic drama

In The New York Times newsroom.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Like most people, I am forever curious about what constitutes the baseline narrative of our times – all the more so for being the news business. My routine for some years now has been to skim the front pages of four newspapers when I get up, then when I come home at night read the three newsprint editions I received in the morning — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. The Washington Post I read on the Web.

I don’t watch any television, except when I travel, but I listen to NPR for half an hour in the morning. I subscribe to four magazines (The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Yorker and Science). I look at Politico’s Web site once or twice a day. And last week I read most of Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts (2019), by Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times.

The daily newspapers are definitely where I get my news. I often think that entering the worlds of their news pages is like listening to a quartet: the Times is a daily violin, exciting and emotional; The Post resembles a viola, warmly supportive of The Times’s themes, but less jittery; the WSJ is something of a cello, understated and lower-pitched; and the FT, a different voice altogether, is more like a piano.

As in any quartet, each institutional player seems well aware of what the others are doing, at least as a daily matter. Long term, I am not so sure. At least in my experience, two developments stand out.

The first is purely local. After some years of disruption, my three papers are always there on the porch in the morning. It is dispiriting to see, as I walk to work, how few houses take delivery of one or the other national papers, compared to 15 years ago – never mind the precipitous decline of The Boston Globe, my local newspaper. But the evidence is of a newsprint-delivery service that once again takes itself seriously as a going concern, after several years of disruption.

The other development has to do with the price that readers pay for their annual print subscriptions: the Times, $1,092; the WSJ, $540; the FT, $406; and The Post, $150 for digital access, plus second subscription to the paper to give away, a month at a time.

Is the print edition of The Times really worth twice what the WSJ charges for its own? If I could read only one newspaper, which would I choose? I understand that the Times’s pricing policy is, in essence, a branding device, the Tiffany among newspapers, and all that. The Times’s cultural and science reporting has been without peer, though cultural reporting is definitely in decline.

Abramson’s book supports that strategy. The tradition of its former staffers burnishing the paper’s reputation goes back to Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power (1969), about The Times; The Powers That Be (1979), by David Halberstam; and The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind The New York Times (1999), by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones.

Halberstam weaved together The Times’s story with four other organizations that had assumed the mantle of media royalty: Henry Luce’s Time Inc.; William Paley’s CBS; Katharine Graham’s Post and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Forty years later, CBS News and Time are ghosts of their former selves, and the LA Times has a new owner.

Abramson intertwines the tale of her paper’s recent ups and down with the story of the Graham family’s sale of The Post to Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos, and the tales of two all-digital up-and-comers that The Times perceives as threats, BuzzFeed and Vice Media. Neither organization has yet delivered on its early promise. Web-based news start-ups Axios and Quartz may pose more serious challenges, not to mention well-established competitors, such as Reuters and Bloomberg News.

Meanwhile, the New York Times Co. reported earlier this month that digital ad revenue had surpassed print ad revenue in the quarter that ended Dec. 31 for the first time in the company’s history. Digital ad sales were up 23 percent, as opposed to 5 percent increase in advertising revenues overall in the period.

That’s good news, surely, except that the surging growth in The Times’s digital-only subscribers may disguise shrinking circulation of its costly newsprint edition, where a full page of advertising costs more than $100,000, according to Abramson. It’s been conventional wisdom for years that print editions are doomed – that it is only a matter of time before they disappear.

Yet print ads have continued to keep newspapers afloat. It’s not the majority of consumers of news who prefer print to digital devices – just a relatively small audience of elite readers for whose attention some kinds of advertisers are willing to pay, all the more so once they see print editions culturally supported by, among others, the papers themselves.

The contest between the very different print and digital pricing strategies of The Times, on the one hand, and the WSJ and the FT on the other, has implications for the long-term narrative of American politics. Who will call the tune? (Because I don’t see the print edition of The Post, I have no real idea what’s going on there.) Those books by Times authors scarcely mention the biggest Times competitor for influence since the 1960s, the WSJ.

Today’s contest between the Murdoch and Sulzberger families deserves more attention than it has been getting. It has implications for the rest of the newspaper industry as well. How many more copies of the big regional newspapers – LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe – would flop up on front porches if subscriptions were priced more like the WSJ instead of The Times? In their golden era, before the advent of search advertising, American newspapers resembled symphonies. If the industry paid more attention to the importance of price, perhaps newspapers might become chamber orchestras again.

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

David Warsh: Globe arts revival and my migration

SOMERVILLE, Mass. Boston is slated to regain a battered badge of its identity next month, when arts coverage is expected to return to the daily broadsheet editions of The Boston Globe. To be sure, the return of a “Living/Arts” section is apparently a consequence of an expanding business coverage. Details are still unclear. It is a heartening development nevertheless.

Distinctive criticism has been a hallmark of Boston’s newspapers since 1830, when the Boston Evening Transcript opened for business. (It closed in 1941.) Thirteen years ago, to save some money in production costs, at a time when the paper was still highly profitable, The Globe banished its critics, along with its coverage of food and personal health, to a tab section it called “G,” printed a day in advance.

That robbed dignity and immediacy from criticism by such distinguished contributors as Mark Feeney, Robert Campbell, Richard Dyer, Gail Caldwell, Ed Siegel, Sebastian Smee, Jeremy Eichler, Wesley Morris and Ty Burr. (Five Pulitzer Prize winners are on that list.) Dyer, Caldwell, Siegel and Morris have left the paper. The tab was among the worst of a long series of bad ideas from the New York Times Co., which bought The Globe for $1.13 billion in 1993 and sold it last year for $70 million.

Google didn’t do that. New York did.

Another mistake, not on the same scale, was shutting down my column "Economic Principals'' {since transformed into www.economic principals.com}. Editor Martin Baron said he wanted technical economics only, no politics. But even if economists sought to strip their discipline of its inevitable political overtones (and most no longer bother to try), it was a terrible idea for newspapers to go along. So EP quit and moved to the Web.  (On the other hand, Baron subsequently hired the last four of those critics.)

Thirteen years later, EP has amply proved its point.  Its coverage of Harvard’s Russia scandal ran circles around that of The Globe, The Times  and The Washington Post (where Baron is now editor). Its reporting on trends in growth economics was praised in  The Times by columnist Paul Krugman (and, a few years later, dismissed on his blog!). Its coverage of the financial crisis has been more penetrating than that of The Times; of the fortunes of the Obama economic team, more realistic; of  U.S.  policy toward Russia, more skeptical; of the competitive situation of print newspapers, less panicky. Like  The Times,  EP made a  dreadful mistake in supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq,

Moreover, EP’s public broadcasting model has proved out. A relative handful of readers support the enterprise with an annual subscription of $50, in return for an early email version on Sunday morning (Eastern Standard Time), with another 20,000 or so reading, over the course of a quarter, the online version for free.

How many pay? From year to year, it’s hard to know, renewal rates being hard to predict – somewhere between 250 and 500, fewer, perhaps, than had been hoped, but enough to keep EP in business.  Subscribers include civic-minded citizens from all walks of life in the four corners of the world.

Others who left The Globe have founded successful public radio talk radio shows: former foreign editor Tom Ashbrook started “On Point;” Steve Curwood, “Fresh Air.”  Bruce Mohl edits Commonwealth magazine.  EP goes it alone, with only its surpassingly loyal copy editor to correct infelicities and, occasionally, restrain enthusiasms. The payroll consists of vegetables, fruit and ice cream

The Times is in the throes of change, but it remains a great newspaper (as do the Financial Times and the The Wall Street Journal, the other papers to whose print editions EP subscribes). You can learn a million things from  The Times that you’ll never see here.

But EP regularly provides a parallax view of developments in economics and politics, as seen from Boston, much the same as it once did at the newspaper itself.

I look forward to many more years of doing the same.

I expect, too, to write slightly more frequently about Boston. The New York Times Co. occupation is ended, but  The Globe  is damaged and the Herald is a shadow of its former self.  The sphere of news-gathering and discussion is considerably attenuated.  The conversation about Boston needs to include many voices.

David Warsh is proprietor of www. economicprincipals.com and an economic historian and longtime financial journalist -- so longtime,  indeed, that he worked at The Wall Street Journal back  in the early '70's, when the overseer of newenglanddiary.com, Robert Whitcomb, was there.

Llewellyn King: The Bradlee I knew and the creation of 'Style'

  Ben Bradlee, who died Oct. 21 at  93, did not so much edit The Washington Post as lead it.

Where other editors of the times would rewrite headlines, cajole reporters and senior editors, and try to put their imprint on everything that they could in the newspaper, that was not Bradlee’s way. His way was to hire the best and leave them to it.

Bradlee often left the building before the first edition “came up,” but it was still his Washington Post: a big, successful, hugely influential newspaper with the imprimatur of one man.

Bradlee looked, as some wag said, like an international jewel thief; someone you would expect to see in one of those movies set in the South of France that showed off the beauty of the Mediterranean and beauties in bikinis while the hero planned a great jewel heist.

I worked for Bradlee for four years and we all, to some degree, venerated our leader. He had real charisma; we not only wanted to please him, but also we wanted to be liked by him.

Bradlee was accessible without losing authority; he was all over the newsroom, calling people by their first names and sometimes by their nicknames, without surrendering any of the power of his office. He was an editor who worked more like a movie director rather than the traditionally detached editors I had known in New York and London.

The irritation at the paper -- and there always is some -- was not so much that Bradlee was a different kind of editor, but that he had a habit, in his endless search for talent, of hiring new people and forgetting, or not knowing, the amazing talent already on the payroll. The Post was a magnate for gifted journalists, but once hired, there were only so many plum jobs for them to do. People who expected great things of their time at the paper were frustrated when relegated to a suburban bureau, or obliged to write obituaries for obscure people.

Yet we knew we were putting out a very good paper and, in some ways, the best paper in the United States. This lead to a faux rivalry with The New York Times. Unlike today, very few copies of The Times were sold in Washington, and even fewer Washington Posts were sold in New York.

Much has been made of Bradlee’s fortitude, along with that of the publisher, Katherine Graham, in standing strong throughout the Watergate investigation that led to President Nixon's registration. But there was another monumental achievement in the swashbuckling Bradlee years: the creation of the Style section of the newspaper.

When Style first appeared, sweeping away the old women’s pages, it went off like a bomb in Washington. It was vibrant, rude and brought a kind of writing, most notably by Nicholas von Hoffman, which had never been seen in a major newspaper: pungent, acerbic, and choking on invective. Soon it was imitated in every paper in America.

The man who created Style was David Laventhol, who came down from New York to fashion something new in journalism. Laventhol was a newspaper mechanic without equal, but Bradlee was the genius who hired him.

When I worked at The Post, I interacted a lot with Bradlee; partly because we enjoyed it, and partly because it was the nature of the work. I knew a lot about newspaper production in the days of hot type and he affected not to. That gave Bradlee the opportunity to exercise one of his most winning traits: disarming candor. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” he said one frantic election night in the composing room.

But when it came to big decisions, Bradlee knew his own mind to the exclusion of the rest of the staff. The nerve center of a newspaper is its editorial conferences -- usually, there are two every day. The first conference is to plan the paper; the second is a reality check on what is new, and how the day is shaping up.

At these conferences, Bradlee would listen from behind his desk. But when he disagreed with the nine assistant managing editors, and others who needed to be there, he would put his feet on the desk, utter an expletive and cut through fuzzy conversation like a scimitar into soft tissue. As we might say nowadays, he had street smarts. They were invaluable to his editorship and to his charm.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He is a longtime publisher,  broadcaster, writer and  international business consultant.