16 Comments Add your own

• 1. flotsam  |  February 8th, 2007 at 4:12 am

  Has he looked at nytimes.com lately when he talks about “leading?”

  Visionless “visionary” I would say.

• 2. Cory  |  February 8th, 2007 at 6:52 am

  Compared to other newspaper sites, I’ll argue NYTimes.com is ahead. And it’s launching user-created video next month with embeddable players .

• 3. invitedmedia  |  February 8th, 2007 at 7:07 am

  i’m left to wonder why it has taken this long for EVERYONE to make this move.

  it appears they are falling over one another to get blogs and ugc on their sites. no matter if no one will use it. i guess it’s just so they can tell their stakeholders they are doing something.

  and the idea that they all are taking the exact same approach is rather risky. the biggest risk for them presently is playing it safe…if it doesn’t work for one, it probably won’t work for any of them.

• 4. Rocker  |  February 8th, 2007 at 7:27 am

  Live in New York…read NY Times content every day online, haven’t touched the dead-tree version for years…BUT…love to spread out all over the house on Sundays. So if they get rid of print, I hope they keep the Sunday tradition going.

  I agree with Cory…as far as I’m concerned, NYTimes.com rocks. Blows CNN.com, MSNBC, YahooNews et al out of the water. It’s the best branded news/info site out there. The other one I use that is also great is GoogleNews, but you can’t compare them…apples and oranges.

• 5. Safran  |  February 8th, 2007 at 7:47 am

  They’ll be printing. It may be a smaller - even tab-format - version, but they’ll be printing.

  I don’t see why people are anti-print. I like having hard copy. There is still demand for hard copy, especially for commuters and on the weekend when you have time to chill with a Sunday paper. Reading a paper online is not satisfying. Getting a story and information is better online, but I’ll still take a dead tree with ink as a part of my media diet. Good roughage, you know.

• 6. themanhattanchannel  |  February 8th, 2007 at 9:18 am

  i’m not so sure they’ll be printing in 5 years… the way things are going that’s an eternity.

  fiber to the node, curb and premises are on the march.

  the battle between cable and telecom for “your” business is sure to heat up. what will differentiate one from the other?

• 7. beachlady  |  February 8th, 2007 at 10:53 am

  Have been reading the NY Times since moving to NYC in 1958. I hate to see it go out of print, since it has a lot more news than most papers. I think the internet has not much to offer in the way of news, except for weather and horror stories .

• 8. Marc Rullo  |  February 8th, 2007 at 12:06 pm

  They won’t be printing it. You will, if you so choose.

• 9. Rocker  |  February 8th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

  Marc, your comment is interesting…plausible if you have an entirely new form of home printing technology in mind. Never work with what we have today from an ease, efficacy or cost perspective (consumer p.o.v.).

• 10. PM  |  February 8th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

  They’ll be printing it twenty years from now. But give the Times credit, the new digitial features, especially MyTimes (from which I linked to this post) and the new Times Reader are rocking good applications.

• 11. Marc Rullo  |  February 8th, 2007 at 2:51 pm

  A simple application that learns what you like and dislike will filter a portion of the content you’re not likely to read. The paper could be a re-usable material and the ink temporary and a personal version of the paper could be waiting for you with your automatically brewed coffee in the morning. Given the huge cost savings, not to mention all the advantages, the question is not if but when. Five years sounds about right, no?

• 12. themanhattanchannel  |  February 8th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

  isn’t this a perfect application for “electronic ink”???

  a “New York Times” tablet that electronically fills itself daily via the net and refreshes the next day without one sheet of paper or drop of ink.

• 13. Marc Rullo  |  February 9th, 2007 at 5:10 am

  Of course. For you and I, but maybe not for many others. My point is that if you like to fold your content under your arm you could do it without nyt having to print a single page.

• 14. themanhattanchannel  |  February 9th, 2007 at 6:42 am

  last time i read any discussion about electronic ink i think it used a mylar-type sheet that could roll and fold like newsprint. i think it had a tiny key ring drive that held “the news” and you paged by hitting some sensor built into the mylar.

  this is a job for jobs.

• 15. John  |  February 9th, 2007 at 6:50 am

  NYTimes still will be printing in TEN years. When I was a sportswriter for my college paper, all the local beat guys from the dailies — perhaps the most cynical of all journalists — kept telling me not to get into newspapers, that maybe I should pursue TV. “It’s a dying industry,” they often told me between sips of cheap draft beer. True as that may have been and still is, these conversations were 15 years ago in what is still a two-paper, mid-sized, midwest market. Though hardly thriving, print continues to avoid the standing-eight count we expected years ago, and while adjustments undoubtedly will be made (Safran’s tab-format theory makes sense), it will certainly evolve rather than just go away.

• 16. Joe Doaks  |  April 4th, 2007 at 4:29 am

  Print is for all practical purposes dead. It will just take a while for it to disappear. The process will be slow and gradual.

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