Michael Arrington’s plan to save The New York Times: The best writers should quit

July 29, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

michael-arrington1It seems like everyone has a plan to save The New York Times, but TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington proposed something a little different today: The best writers should just quit and start their own blog.

“If the top 50 journalists out of The New York Times walked out the door, raised $100 million from a hedge fund and started a site, it would be profitable.” Arrington said, speaking at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford.

The idea here is because that The Times has built up such an inefficient, old media infrastructure with astronomically higher costs, it would be better if the best writers started fresh. Keep in mind that Arrington isn’t exactly an objective observer. It makes sense that he’d want writers to abandon The New York Times, since he has had spats with the paper before. (Then again, we here at VentureBeat are big supporters of the leave-a-newspaper-start-a-blog career path — Matt Marshall founded the site after leaving The San Jose Mercury News, and most of our other writers, including me, have done time at daily papers.)

So what can those top 50 writers learn from Arrington’s business model? Well, they’d better enjoy throwing conferences. Arrington said only 10 to 20 percent of of TechCrunch’s revenue comes from normal advertising on the website, while 50 percent comes from conferences. (Yes, I know these parts don’t add up to 100 percent.)

“We don’t think of our business in terms of creating page views and figuring out RPM [revenue per 1,000 impressions],” he added. “We’ve always had a brand and we’ve always monetized the brand. We’ve always focused on keeping costs under control and we’ve grabbed the biggest money we could, while still being ethical.”

TechCrunch also has a research arm that has a “substantial” amount of revenue from quarterly reports on start-up financing. But he said it “doesn’t seem like a long-term win. It’s sort of like selling music. People put it up on Bit Torrent.”

Oh, and unrelated to business models, here’s another Arrington nugget from the conference: “I often have some disdain for my readers.” I know how you feel, Mike. I have some disdain for TechCrunch readers, too.

[image:flickr/Joi]

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • IM_ASL
    It is simple economics: the application of the 80/20 principle might dictate that 80 % of the real (valuable) work is done by only 20% of the staff. That would allow you to infer that that other 80% of that staff are, at best, producing work that contributes to (in the case of the NYTimes) a fairly sizable net loss.

    So, as print declines does it make sense to support those that are not contributing to the success of the organization?
  • That story on TechCrunch was factually inaccurate. Not surprising. While it was good to see a post on TC not bashing “journalism” and throwing it in the “Old Media” garbage can media publications in the vein of TC do a horrible job of accurate reporting - i.e fact checking . At best the comparison between the New York Times and Tech Crunch as a business model is an audacious attempt at finger pointing “we have it right, you have it wrong”. The cost of doing business for the NY Times goes beyond the desk, surfing the web. Fact checking, thorough research, in depth analysis, interviews from multiple sources, on the ground news reporting to begin with for example costs money. Their "Look, I sent you a link! Oh, well I sent you a link too! That's great, we're journalists!" approach works for TMZ style reporting and keeps the cost overhead low. But it’s not journalism.

    Just look at the numbers on the surface. Where do they get that $10/$12 million number from? You can pull more accurate data on benefits from any number of sources. Try the US Department of Labor, benefits account anywhere from %30-%40 percent depending on the source, 30.3% from the US DOL. You can say the low end puts you at 13+m and the high at 14m - big deal what’s a million or two.

    Secondly, they failed to include in depth contextual breakdown of the number of employees at the Times. I’m sure the writer/reporter to editor ratio is higher at the NYT than most people would expect, perhaps even bloated, but to throw numbers around and cost breakdowns based on top level numbers (comscore/earnings reports etc) is just irresponsible “journalism”. Of course, as in the case with most of their articles perhaps they assume their readers have that information handy. One might argue to the contrary based on Arrington’s own “painfully easy” note in the comments (hilarious BTW) section.

    BTW – this jest of this comment went on the TC comment section too. And on that note, I’ll say one good thing about TC, aside from their speed to market and how much they cover (impressive by any standard) they rarely censor/remove negative comments criticizing the TC brand. I can’t say the same thing about a lot of online publications, that includes the New York Times.
  • Good points, Ben, especially that comparing TechCrunch's model with the NYT's is fraught with problems. That said, I do think that they have a really strong editorial team, and despite some mistakes, I haven't seen evidence of the consistent inaccuracy/reporting shoddiness that some people seem eager to attribute to them.

    (Also, just to be clear, since it looks like you commented after checking out the TC article, this post isn't really about the TC article -- since Arrington hadn't published it when I wrote this -- but rather a summary of his remarks at a conference.)
  • You are correct Anthony. My commentary was on the TC article, as I understand the post, an extension of Arrington's comments at AlwaysOn. In terms of mistakes as an avid reader, I don't believe there are chronic issues with inaccuracy in their reporting, (mistakes that's a given and well documented) but rather, to my point in comparing TC to the NYT, the added value of providing deep contextual meaning, and the inherent cost of that process in journalism.