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February 2017

New York Times Co.’s Decline in Print Advertising Tempered by Digital Gains

Precipitous declines in print advertising rocked the newspaper industry in 2016. And while The New York Times Company recorded significant growth in subscriptions and promising increases in digital advertising, it nevertheless has not avoided the inevitable. The company said Feb 2 that its print advertising revenue in 2016 fell 16 percent, driving a 9 percent drop in total advertising revenue. For the quarter, print advertising revenue declined 20 percent.

The story on the digital side was positive. Digital advertising revenue rose 6 percent last year, to $209 million. The Times added 514,000 net digital-only subscriptions for its news products during the year, bringing its total to 1.6 million. Buoyed by readers’ intense interest in the presidential election, The Times added 276,000 net digital-only subscriptions to its news products in the last three months of the year. Including print and crossword product subscriptions, The Times now has more than three million total paid subscribers.

Analysis

Broadband Over Power Lines -- We Really Mean It This Time

Regular Digital Beat readers know Andrew Jay Schwartzman writes a monthly column on telecommunications and media policy issues. You might consider also reading The Daily Item, in which Schwartzman offers you just one thing you might have missed. Below is The Daily Item for February 2, 2017, reprinted with Schwartzman's approval.

How Did Cybersecurity Become So Political?

Less than a month before he was elected president, Donald Trump promised to make cybersecurity “an immediate and top priority for my administration.” He had talked about technology often on the campaign trail—mostly to attack Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server when she was Secretary of State. But less than two weeks into his presidency, it’s Trump and his team who have struggled to plug important security holes, some of which are reminiscent of Clinton’s troubles. Rather than sparking an uproar, the problems have largely been buried the by other changes and crises of the Trump administration’s first days. But even without the distracting firehose of executive orders, announcements, and tweets, half of America wouldn’t blink at the new president’s computer-security shortcomings. That’s because cybersecurity, like just about everything else, has become burdened with political baggage.

Federal workers turn to encryption to thwart Trump

Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda. Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.

The goal is to get their message across while not violating any rules covering workplace communications, which can be monitored by the government and could potentially get them fired. At the EPA, a small group of career employees — numbering less than a dozen so far — are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trump’s political appointees undermine their agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, apparently.

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