Michael Hirschorn is getting hammered for his speculation in the Atlantic that the New York Times could be out of business in a few months. Obviously, that’s unlikely. But his overall thrust – that the Times print edition will likely fade away and be supplanted by something that resembles the Huffington Post, a combination of aggregator and original journalism – is probably correct. The Times is, of course, the best newspaper in America, and the breadth of what it covers is remarkable. But let’s face it, with the huge smorgasbord of news sources available online, it’s far less remarkable than it used to be. The basic function of the daily newspaper’s print edition – to tell you all you need to know about your community (or in the case of the NYT, the world) in a single package – is no longer essential. The NYT’s relative, walled isolation online (its initial stab at aggregating notwithstanding), modeled on the daily paper experience, isn’t adapted to the way people imbibe news today.
I don’t know that the NYT-as-HuffPost outcome – which includes a fraction of the original journalism the Times does today – is inevitable, though. The Times brand has power and in may be worth more online than we think.
The paper has managed to make its business model work up to now by turning itself into a tastemaker for the boho class, embedding serious journalism amid lots and lots of lifestyle sections. People still want to be told what to wear, what to eat, and where to vacation by an (allegedly) unimpeachable cultural authority. That’s one advantage that may translate to the web (provided its purveyors actually understand the web) even as tastes fragment and diversify.
