While lies such as “leaving for personal reasons” or “creative differences” are commonplace in the corporate world, somehow one would think that the NYT’s would hold itself to a higher standard. In truth, if something is a success it isn’t canceled. If you love someone you don’t divorce or kill them. If a CEO is doing a good job you don’t fire them.

In discussing the elimination of TimesSelect, Vivian Schiller, SVP and GM of NYTimes.com told PaidContent:

“This is what is really important—it did work. It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

In other words, “what we did was the right path–unless, of course, you consider the other options available to us.”

Invading Iraq was the right course, unless of course you compare it to not invading Iraq.

The Times had two ways of monetizing their inventory: charging for access or giving it away for free and selling ads. They chose the former and this would have been a good strategy if they had been able to sell sufficient subscriptions. But they couldn’t and could only muster about 227,000 subscribers. This number of subscribers was insufficient to match the expected revenues of offering the inventory for free, a model which they could have operated under the entire time. By most people’s definition their strategy would be called a “failure” and the new move would be called “reacting to that failure.” TimeWarner was able to call the old AOL pay-for-access model a dying model when they converted over to free but the Times cannot muster this level of transparency.

While we applaud the move (free is better), we’d just assume have them admit what everyone knows.

h/t: LA Observed

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 6:34 pm by Insider and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.