I feel that NYTimes is the only news organization that has been able to transition to the Digital Era. Does anyone else know of any other old-school news organization that nicely transitioned to the Digital Era?
This means that NPR cannot go around their stations directly to their audience. They simply don't have the infrastructure and resources to raise an equivalent amount of donations directly. And as a matter of preference they don't want to hurt the local stations. They like the local stations.
It puts major restrictions on their product strategy. Everything they do has to have a way to tie back to a local station, and drive donations to local stations. If they just send everyone to NPR.org, they will go out of business.
In this respect, the NYTimes is in a better position for digital. They directly own all their reader and customer relationships, so they have more freedom to innovate.
[1] http://blogs.census.gov/2015/08/13/majority-of-americans-dri...
1. All Things Considered - 13M weekly listeners 3. Morning Edition - 13M 6. Marketplace - 9M
Cue well-polished NPR briefing
Do you not feel patronized when one news outlet claims to be the ONLY one you need? Part of being a responsible citizen these days is seeking out a range of sources.
"This program is brought to you by -insert brand name, followed by slogan of the brand-".
Though separate now (FT is owned by Nikkei of Japan, The Economist is now principally held by the Agnelli family, who founded Fiat, along with several other families including Cadbury, Layton, Rothschild, and Schroder.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/15/economist-beco...
The latest in a long series of articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/business/media/buyouts-wal...
I hope the traditional newspaper with deep, broad, daily coverage can survive, but I'm not sure they can. We may be left with state news organizations (BBC), donation supported news organizations (NPR), news organizations that do newsgathering for the purpose of informing investments (Bloomberg), and organizations with less ambitious coverage goals (any of the online news magazines). The wire services may end up being the last to go or they may carve out a niche even if the national papers of record can't.
The Guardian have a massive endowment (£842 million), but have also been failing to meet costs based on advertising and subscriptions revenues.
FT have an article (search headline via Google in Incognito mode to read):
Guardian launches paid membership scheme https://www.ft.com/content/39ad0574-390d-11e4-9526-00144feab...
The Guardian has launched a paid membership scheme, as it seeks to narrow operating losses that reached £33.8m last year.
Given the size of the endowment, that's a 24 year burn-rate.
>The Times and The Sunday Times, reported an operating profit of £21m for the year ending June 2015, up from £1.7m in 2014. Previously, the company had suffered a run of losses covering every year since 2002.