Clearly the NY Times among other newspapers, needs to cut the fat and quickly. Sadly though, it seems like most newspapers refuse to catch this in time and hence, we see the ongoing newspaper bust taking place before us.
In this article, I was fascinated with a relatively obvious solution to the issues facing newspapers today. In short, start over with the best of the best. No silly overlords to create issues once again. Instead, get a good web dev and start completely over.
It’s a crazy idea…but it is crazy enough that it could work if done correctly. As the article goes on to point out, if enough people believed in the idea of redoing some of the nation’s top newspapers, clearly funding them would not be a huge deal at all.
Though I agree on the fact that old school business model related to newspapers is over, I’m quite convinced that future of newspapers is somewhere else. As I said many times I think of something based on personalization vs clusterization and so on.
I don’t think that printed newspapers will die, though as now is happening they will be integrated with innovative media different from the web.
One last word on the concept of starting from scratch: is suggestive, but not feasible. We are talking of a big business and is not possible to “kill” to rebuild. Obviously NYT will go through a massive restructuring, but IMHO is not possibile to close and start again.