The New York Times Claws Its Way into the Future

> I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the Times

You asked for it. :) If any of these are inappropriate for you to answer, I understand. Thanks much in advance:

1) The Innovation Report came out in 2014. Per the article (and corroborated by other things I've read), it changed attitudes at the Times because "You couldn’t read that report and think that the status quo was an option." People there still thought the status quo was an option as late as 2014! Is it just standard incumbency psychology - where the incumbent power in an industry lives in an echo chamber, is tied down by vested interests, and can't see change coming - or is something else going on?

2) I've read a few internal reports, leaked and released. All repeat how great the NY Times is -'the best in the world', 'the greatest', etc. - over and over. It was in the Innovation Report, which was supposed to be only for top management to read. These reports aren't marketing to the public (and NYT marketing doesn't use that message nearly as much as the internal reports I saw) and these aren't stated missions ('our goal is to be the world leader in ...'); it looks like flattery in internal communications. It seems like an odd bit of narcissism. What about the culture requires them to tell themselves how great they are? Are they that insecure? Usually highly successful organizations don't need to say that to each other; they know. OTOH, maybe my sample size is too small and it's not really an issue.

3) It still seems to me that they are still a newspaper (emphasis on that old medium, paper) making accommodations to the electronic medium, rather than a news publication on the Internet. Stories still are told almost entirely in text, which was a limitation of the old medium but not the new, and images and video usually are decoration rather than a primary means of story-telling. Even two-bit bloggers will, rather than describing something, just show it to the reader: 'The building is rundown: <img>'. I read a story that described how some innovative high school dance program started class each day with (a dance and song?) - why not just show me a video? Occasionally they have helpful graphics, but they talk like that's a special event rather than a norm of the medium and usually it's a separate story - 'the graphics story' - they can't seem to tell a story integrating different mediums as needed. What is going on? Are they just stuck? Will they let go of the old medium before it's too late?

EDIT: A few edits

Why? I understand the holy wars between devotees of Rust and Go, but if anything I'm impressed that the NYT would actually look beyond 1990s languages.

Hello! I was one of those annoying "architects" saying no, but it wasn't because only three languages are allowed. When I left the Times about six months ago, systems were actively being developed in the following languages: PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Scala. (And ObjC and Swift, if you want to count those.) Plenty of unmaintained legacy systems in other languages, too. So proposals to add yet another language (Clojure, right?) were I think understandably received with some skepticism. It's not that it couldn't happen, just that there'd have to be a hell of a good reason, and there wasn't. It was unfortunate that months of work were invested before a proposal was written, but that wouldn't have been a very good reason to approve it.

For what it's worth, I agree with almost everything else you said.

Oh man, count yourself lucky if you never had "fun" with context. :) For everyone who hasn't had that ... joy, imagine perl4, but compiled and running in its own proprietary vm with a ton of employer-environment-specific extensions. It was 100% in-house to the Times. When I interviewed, part of the process was them throwing a screenful of it at you and asking "OK, what does this do?" as a test of your general ability to reason out things you had no possible way of getting pre-exposure to. The only redeeming value that it had really was that it was a) pretty fast b) pretty small in terms of memory requirements. I can't think of a single thing about it that PHP wouldn't be a better fit for though on every metric, and I'm certainly no fan of PHP. After I left that job one of the biggest drivers for me wanting to take compilers eventually was thinking back to what a shitshow working with ctx was and how badly I would've wanted a ctx2php transpiler. I worked on the team that among other things handled the login/auth system, which was sufficiently antediluvian that it had a lot of ctx code.

> Is journalism so, so much more expensive to produce than entertainment?

There's a temporal component here that's much more important for journalism than it is for those other two forms of entertainment.

For example, The Shawshank Redemption was made 23 years ago and is still a fantastic movie: People will still pay to watch that movie. In contrast, very few people will pay money to read a news article from even two days ago (let alone 23 years ago).

Sony could never produce another movie again and have a sizable revenue stream just from distribution rights on their existing film catalog. The NYT can't really do that, the demand for old news articles just isn't that great.

The equivalent of a news subscription then isn't really Netflix or Spotify: It's going to the movies, or going to a concert, or buying an album. All of which are notoriously considered to be expensive affairs.

I'd even go so far as to say the NYT would probably absolutely let you read older articles for cheap (a few $ a month), but the demand for that is non-existent so it's silly to even offer.

Oh dear - just realized pressreader does not make it clear at all what they do on their website. They give online access to 5.000 print publications from all over the world and charge either per single issue (0.99£ in my case), or 29.99£ per month to access all of it. So it seems to be pretty close to what you are looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PressReader

Downside: A lot of the publications are insignificant/ very similar to each other. They do have some good ones like the Guardian, but I'm still missing some personal favourites, so haven't joined yet.