Outsource printing and distribution.

These are not core business.

In Madrid, 20 Minutos the leading Spanish newspaper has an on-off line integrated newsroom that during 75% of the working day is focused on the website, and in the evening produces the free print paper.

In the same way, let’s keep the NYT newsroom working 75% of the time for the website on weekdays and produce on weekends the paid print editions.

INNOVATION’s Carlo Campos, a former McKinsey consultant, has been for many years talking to me about this 75/25% model.

If The New York Times follows his idea, believe me, a newspaper world revolution will follow too.

What do you think Carlo?

Juan Antonio

What about a free website from Monday to Friday and keep just printed editions for Saturday and Sunday?

Juan Antonio

See my response to your challenge above.

Yes, Keller wants it to happen at the Times. But what, specifically, should journalists at the Times ask its users to do? Let’s hear some very concrete next steps. We’re listening.

I started to read your piece prepared to moan about another New Media guy making another unrealistic recommendation about a business he doesn’t understand. But you know what? I think your suggestion is, as the Brits would say, spot on!

It’s really all about The New York Times Company figuring out what it does best and getting rid of everything else. And yes, I think what it does best at its flagship newspaper is national and international news. And what it does best at the Boston Globe is local news. The IHT is an ego play that doesn’t make sense financially. The regional newspapers were an ill-conceived effort many years ago to diversity the company’s sources of revenue by investing in faster-growing markets, primarily in the South and West. Not much diversification really. And no synergies.

Testing a separate Sports section also is a good idea. When I was at The Times way back when, we struggled with how to let people buy just the sections of the newspaper they wanted to read. That couldn’t be done then for two reasons 1) legacy production and distribution systems made it impossible to customize the newspaper for individual buyers, and 2) the business model required aggregating the largest number of readers possible for each edition to support ad rates, which is why sports is packaged with bridge, politics, entertainment, and recipes. A digital version of The Times eliminates those concerns.

You also are right on about separating the production and distribution operations. Airlines no longer own their own airplanes — they lease them, freeing up valuable capital for other purposes. Newspapers should do the same with presses (and in fact, some are: check the San Francisco Chronicle). The Times essentially has outsourced distribution by handing if off to a company it largely owns — PCF — which also distributes other products.

The only place where I disagree with you is your insistence on giving readers more of a voice in what the newspaper offers by way of content. I guess I’m an elitist, and I really don’t care what the majority of people want to read. I want my content selected and edited by super-smart people who save me time by not exposing me to pointless blather.

It is hard to push the analogy too far because of two fundamental differences between business relationships in the era of broadcast mass media and the distributed, fragmented, user-driven, present day. Those two differences are, needless to say, that a broadcast network used to operate in a now-disappeared environment of scarcity and monopoly. Advertising inventories were finite; and affiliates delivered network content exclusively.

That having been said, the relationship between the network and the affiliate can still be thought of as a crude form of reverse syndication — or reverse syndication can be thought of as a pale evocation of the affiliate structure.

The affiliate sacrificed much of its ability to monetize its own audience by directing that audience to content that was controled by the network, knowing that the quality of that content was superior to what the affiliate itself could produce because of the network’s economies of scale. The network provided content of national and international scope; the affiliate supplemented it with local content, whose revenues it did not share with the network.

The network, taking advantage of the eyeballs directed to it by its affiliates, offered one-stop-shopping to Madison Avenue, offering advertisers economies of scale that affiliates are unable to achieve alone. In return, the networks allowed the affiliates to retain a proportion of their advertising inventory for local sale, even as they took advantage of the larger audiences that the network’s superior content delivered.

In recent years the broadcast networks themselves have been operated virtually as loss leaders, using all of their revenues to produce content, none for profit, and relying on their ownership of their own affiliates in the nation’s most lucrative markets for those profits. Thus the networks have, in effect, been subsidizing the operation of their non-owned-and-operated affiliates for the sake of building a national footprint that could allow them to make similar profits from that portion of the network represented by their own O-&-Os.

We are now nearing the end of the broadcast network affiliate model, as viewers seeking national content online can go directly to the network without having to be directed there by the local affiliate. I do not visit Channel Four’s Website in order to see NBC News video; I can go directly to msnbc.com. Interestingly if one obtains a video from abcnews.com it uses cookies to append the ID of the local affiliate to its URL, so ABC, at least, is trying to preserve some Reverse Syndication bookkeeping as part of its online operation.

Reverse Syndication, nowadays, would not have the obvious value that the link between networks and affiliates had in the last century. But even in its diluted form, it seems to me that your model — the distribution of expensive content from a central core and the direction of local audiences to the central core — has reminiscent echoes of the broadcast system.

Each topic is covered by *one* person. At least with the Wikipedia you have crowdsourcing to provide some balance. If the Wikipedia cannot be cited as an authoritative source, I would be more circumspect about anything posted on About.com.

If you were considering selling About.com, now is the time to do it. It’s value is based on the traffic it generates, at least for the present. I don’t see their strategy for the future, how they plan to adapt as we move past Web 2.0, or compete against dedicated initiatives such as Google Health.

The NY Times should stick to their knitting: news and feature reporting. The ideal strategy for presenting encyclopedia information, which is About.com’s domain, is still emerging. If you’re cynical enough to believe that profession of journalism is evaporating, I would imagine that you’d look for a new solution, not stick with an old model.

I agree this would be interesting. In one sense the least attractive part of the business could have the most to gain, and thus a market is certainly there and profitability is still there. Since we’re talking about production and distribution, we’re probably looking at several buyers in a variety of markets, but don’t let that pull you out of the discussion; Jeff’s idea here leaves content and advertising in its newspaper-media domain, with the caveat that the content & advertising does not always come from the papers. Hence the radicalism involved.

@Jay: The problem: Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. would have to execute it. I have seen no signs that he is capable of such.

I do not want to pretend to know anything substantive about Sulzberger other than he’s a Times Family Man so I am asking in earnest: in your view is there a way to execute the experiment, or specifically, are there other manners the Globe could become the petri dish of the Times, perhaps on a smaller scale than Jarvis presented?