Sure enough, it was a piece by Henry Blodget at Silicon Valley Insider entitled Our Plan To Fix The New York Times . It was posted in January, 2009, more than two years ago.

It contained three steps.

1. Cut costs 40% by 2010.
2. Continue to raise print subscription prices
3. Explore charging an online subscription fee

Read the whole article. It sounds very close to what has been happening at the New York Times. Interesting how smart this blogging world is.

Of course, industry insiders knew, as did government officials in the department of Minerals Management Service, that Blowout Preventers have flaws and indeed something as simple as a valve could cause a catastrophic accident. This from the New York Times, about the supposedly ultimate oil blowout stopper, the blind shear ram, which failed at the BP disaster:

As it turns out, records and interviews show, blind shear rams can be surprisingly vulnerable. There are many ways for them to fail, some unavoidable, some exacerbated by the stunning water depths at which oil companies have begun to explore.

But they also can be rendered powerless by the failure of a single part, a point underscored in a confidential report that scrutinized the reliability of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. The report, from 2000, concluded that the greatest vulnerability by far on the entire blowout preventer was one of the small shuttle valves leading to the blind shear ram. If this valve jammed or leaked, the report warned, the ram’s blades would not budge.

This sort of “single-point failure” figures prominently in an emerging theory of what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon’s blind shear ram, according to interviews and documents.

If you want to understand what went wrong at the BP deep-water well, this is a must read –and it’s also a must read if you want to understand the need for news organizations like the New York Times.

The article and the graphic are a grim reminder of what is happening. It’s a reminder why so many folks, including all of us at the Center for Sustainable Journalism, are trying to find new models.

Here is the graphic’s introduction:

Heavy debt has dragged several newspaper companies into bankruptcy. The industry’s dwindling revenues have forced some money-losing papers to close, and papers that are for sale are having trouble finding buyers. Experts say that before long, a major American city could be left without a daily paper.

Here is the key paragraph from the related story:

“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.

Here is a quote from Joel Kramer:

“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

Right now the Times has approximately a circulation of about 1 million. To have it delivered can cost a subscriber as much as $600 a year.  What if The New York Times said we want to put the newsroom into a cooperative trust owned by its readers as it eases into the online world.

We own the newsroom, the New York Times owns everything else and the governance for the newsroom would remain much the way it has been in the past.

If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times paid $400 a year, just for it online, but also got shares into the cooperative, that would be $400 million a year. The Times newsroom costs about $200 million a year to operate. The extra $200 would go into an endowment, so in five years there would be a billion dollars, in ten years $2 billion. Enough that the subscription rate would go down for anyone who contributed for ten years. A ten year investment would be $4,000 or $2,000 less that what you pay for the newspaper now.

It would be like owning the Green Bay Packers, but it would be owning The New York Times’s newsroom. The larger company could do whatever it wants on the business side, but we would all own the newsroom and demand high quality news. Perhaps we would work out a deal that a certain percentage of the business side profits would go into the news endowment. Of course, the cooperative trust would be set up in a way that the Sam Zells of the world could never intrude.

Would I sign up, if asked today? Yes. Of course, the real test is — Would you?

David, you are a hell of a reporter and columnist, you are especially good at pointing out what’s wrong. From now on could you point out how to get things fixed? Focusing on Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich’s debacle, you write about the need for investigative journalism. Yeah, so David, who among your column readers didn’t already know about that need?

In that column you quote Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, who says:

“This was an extraordinary week for The Chicago Tribune. On Monday, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and on Tuesday, this huge story broke. There are two messages there. One, that the business model has to be reinvented and two, the importance of doing public service reporting.”

In that quote there are two messages for you also. 1) Start doing research and reporting aimed at reinventing the business models; so, 2) we can save public service journalism.
In fact, after the Oscars are over, ask your executive editor Bill Keller and your publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to gather an innovation team of really smart reporters: you from media, someone from business, someone who understands technology and someone else who could specialize in social media and social networking.

Then you investigate solutions for reinventing journalism business models and maybe reinventing journalism itself. You do so in a completely transparent way that engages your audience and reaches out to them for their ideas too. There are literally hundreds of people and organizations trying to figure out how to reinvent this thing we all love, you could pull all the pieces together. It would be admirable public service journalism worthy of a Red Carpet treatment and a Pulitzer too.

What is it that subscribers to The New York Times really pay for each day? The paper without the news on it is worthless. At the same time, consumers refuse to pay for news served up on the Internet. So right now as a consumer product, news without paper is also worthless. People only seem to be willing to pay for two worthless commodities when they are combined into one. In the case of The New York Times they pay $10 a week, $500 a year. Strange isn’t it.

In the past, you could argue that people also wanted the ads, but you won’t be able to make that argument much longer. Ads and news are decoupling. News and paper are decoupling. You will still have ads, news and paper, just not together any more.

No one wants empty paper, so you can push that aside. So we are left with ads and news. There will be plenty of places to get your ads. So no worry there. Now we have that orphan news.

Without proper nurturing that little orphan will wilt away. Who will adopt it? Who will nurture it? Who will help it stand on its own?

So let’s say the more than 300,000 subscribers of the now bankrupt Chicago Tribune got mad as hell at Sam Zell and decided they would start their own cooperative news organization. For $3 a week each they could own the journalism equivalent of the Green Bay Packers. Citizen owned journalism support by $45 million annually with each person just investing $3 a week. Do the math $3 a week or a $150 a year times 300,000 potential citizen owners equals $45 million.

You could have $30 million going to the newsroom and an additional $15 million into an endowment so that over time the actual cost to the citizen owners would go down. But alas it would require paying for news without paper and, of course, we know that’s a totally crazy idea.

Through Friday, of 270 news articles published in The Times about the election since the national tickets were formed in late August, only 29, or a little over 10 percent, were primarily about policy substance. And that is a generous tally that includes some very brief items.

That count by my assistant, Michael McElroy, is similar to figures compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has been closely monitoring election coverage in a wide range of media. The group found that only 8 percent of front-page articles in The Times from late August through last Sunday were about policy. Nearly three-quarters were about the horse race, political tactics, polls and the like. The Times numbers are about the same as for the news media in general, including cable television and blogs — not a standard to aspire to.

Apparently, that does not make the public happy; Hoyt writes:

Early this year, roughly three-quarters of voters of all political persuasions surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they wanted more coverage of the candidates’ stands on issues. For the most part, they were disappointed, and their satisfaction with the news media has declined, according to Pew. In February, 55 percent said the election coverage was good or excellent. By June, 54 percent said it was fair or poor.

Those interested in civic and public journalism have been taking on this issue since the public journalism reform movement began  after the 1988 presidential election. Jay Rosen has been one of the most informed critics. Here is what he said back in January, 2008. Here is what I wrote in October 2007 and if you want to keep going back, here is Rosen again in 2004 with his PressThink piece Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race. Forever!

If I were surveyed, I would answer that I want more issue oriented stories. However, here is a confession: I can’t help myself, apparently like a lot of political junkies, each day I visit places like FiveThirtyEight.com which provides fantastic horse race coverage, just like inside baseball. It is addictive. Here is what FiveThirtyEight posted last week about the site’s audience growth:

Seven months ago today this site … went live, with 80 visits. Yesterday we reached 693,216 … Glancing at the daily circulation figures for US newspapers, it looks like we’re at or about the top ten and rising with a bullet.

So for me I want my polls and my substantial reporting too. Right now we are obviously getting more of the former and too little of the latter and that is the big problem now, has been the problem in the past and will probably be the problem forever.

Demonstrates how breaking events, mixed with solid continuous reporting can be intriguing and deeply informative.

I guess the best place to start is with his speech he made at the Second Annual Global Conference on Individuated Newspapers back in June. Then we will look at what he wrote this week. In his June speech, he said in part:

More than 1.3 billion people are gravitating to whatever … matches their individually unique mix of interests. They’re gravitating away from Mass Media and its one-size-fits-all attempt at satisfying 1.3 billion unique mixes of interests.

I’ll say it again: billions of people are gravitating online to find much more relevant matches of their interest than the traditional practices of Mass Media can give them.

The analog printing press, now more than 500 years old, cannot provide each of us what we want. The Internet can. Crosbie says:

The reason why Google and Yahoo! are the most used sites online is because people are hunting and gathering to find the topics that match their myriad and individual specific interests….

And those billions of people are gravitating away from generic, analog products that deliver the same mix of news to everyone. They’re moving away from the analog newspaper.

And going online is not helping, Crosbie told the audience back in June:

let’s look only at The New York Times, the premier among … 100 American dailies. The average visitor to its Web site … spent less time on the site all month than the average reader of the Times’ newsprint editions spends in a day. The figures for most other American dailies are even worse.

His perscription for change:

publishers must stop using only analog editorial practices and immediately begin adopting the technologies of mass customization. All of those technologies now exist. The pieces of technology are there, the publishers merely need to adopt and assemble them.

Okay that was in June, here is Crosbie this week on the fate of newspapers, it is just part of his essay fully supported by extensive numerical evidence:

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies — namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily. Further layoffs of staffs by those newspapers’ companies cannot avoid this fate – not so long as daily circulations and readerships continually and increasingly decline. (Layoffs are becoming little more than the remedy of bleeding that was used in attempts to cure ill patients during the 18th Century and cannot restore the industry’s health.)

It gets worse:

‘Hyperlocal’ news startup companies, whose services will be delivered not on newsprint but online, might replace many small dailies, but not most, and certainly not before the printed products’ demise. The deaths of large numbers of daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t cause a new Dark Age but will certainly cause a ‘Gray Age’ for American journalism during the next decade. Much local and regional news won’t see the light of publication.

Crosbie will be writing more in the coming days at his site, but alas this sentence is the one that I find the most depressing:

I’ll outline what the American daily industry might have done to avoid its demise.

Might have done, as if it is too late already.

People pay directly for journalism they want. $ 2 million. Would there be 20,000 listeners across the nation willing to pay $100 each annually for the Bryant Park Project? Divide that by 50 states that comes out to 400 per state. Presumably there are that many folks in each state who are not regular contributors who would be willing to pay for this new programming. Of course, too often the folks at local stations want to protect turf at the expense of expanding their turf. BPP is turf expansion for a healthy NPR future.

Another approach: Would there be 1,600 people in each state willing to pay $25 a year. You want to get young folks hooked into the news habit, this might be an avenue. 

However, here is a better idea, why doesn’t the New York Times buy into the program and have it as a joint operation between the Times and NPR. Both would benefit by engaging a young, smart demographic they will need in the future to survive.