Joshua Benton

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily.  Back in 1975, a thousand media ecosystems ago, the FCC passed a well-intentioned rule that said a city’s newspaper couldn’t be owned by the same company that owns one of its TV or radio stations.

[Commentary] One lesson I learned early on in news is that what journalists value and what their audiences value are often frustratingly misaligned. We see high-quality news outlets and low-quality ones and wonder why anyone would choose the latter over the former. But the decisions of customers aren’t driven solely by perceptions of “quality”; they’re also derived from more prosaic factors like customer service, cost, feelings of community and personal connection, and a sense that both sides of the transaction have similar interests at heart.

In an environment where trust is no longer the default — where reading your local daily in the morning and watching a news broadcast at night have moved from standard to niche behavior — doing great journalistic work isn’t enough.

[Commentary] There are few things that can galvanize the news world’s attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson’s ouster probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter’s GDP numbers. We don’t typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan’s very capable cadre of media reporters. But Abramson’s removal and Dean Baquet’s ascent has apparently inspired someone inside the Times to leak one of the most remarkable documents I’ve seen in my years running the Lab, to Myles Tanzer at BuzzFeed.

It’s the full report of the newsroom innovation team that was given six full months to ask big questions about the Times’ digital strategy. As bad as this report makes parts of the Times’ culture seem, there are two significant reasons for optimism.

First: So much of the digital work of The New York Times is so damned good, despite all the roadblocks detailed here. Take those barriers away and think what they could do. And second: While it was a group effort, the leader of this committee was Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher’s son and the presumed heir to the throne, either when his father retires in a few years or sometime thereafter. His involvement in this report shows that he understands the issues facing the institution. That speaks well for the Times’ future.