NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; print media is like Titanic

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Here's a shocking statement from a person who one would think is not ready to give up on print media: New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

NY Magazine talked to the media mogul at a benefit for the New Literacy Project, and asked what advice he had for journalism students looking for a job in print media:

"Um, what I would tell them is the industry is in the midst of a massive transition," he said. "But the core of the fundamental job is critical. We have to re-create ourselves, but the heart of what we're going to re-create is still journalism. The way people get information is changing, but the need for information will remain constant."

He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. "The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?" he asked. We hadn't. "What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?" We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? "A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?" he said, shaking his head. "Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed," he said. "Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane."

He went on to say there would be print, but it will not be the driving force. I agree but I'll go a step beyond what he said. The driving force in the future will be multimedia - video, web, print, audio - and all of the same content.

Take my example you're reading: it's also in video form with me speaking, and I can strip out the audio and have an Mp3 version and print the website page and have a paper version. So that's web, print, video, and audio versions of the same message.

Imagine that as the foundation for a news company. That's the future.

That said and written,I can't think of a firm - well a big media company - that's actively headed in that direction. Not one.

But back to The Titanic and Sulzberger. Art Jr.'s analogy is appropriate because the New York Times opened the first three months of 2009 with a $74 million operating loss. Overall, American newspaper circulation fell more than 10 percent.

That, folks, is the beginning of a long-term death spiral. Ad sales rates are based on subscription size; if that falls then newspapers can't charge the same rates because they don't have as great a reach, so revenue is even less, leading to more cuts in production, which impacts circulation until a steady state is reached.

But where that steady state of circulation is, is anyone's best guess.

I can't help but wonder what Phil Bronstein thinks of Sulzberger's comments...