The New York Times Is Looking for Nonprofit Funding. Will It Succeed Where Others Have Failed?
"Fractured Lands," a prodigious New York Times Magazine piece last year on the chaos in the Middle East, was an inadvertent window onto a fractured business model.
It was thus relevant that Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn prominently referenced the piece Friday and its funding by a nonprofit journalism organization when they announced that Janet Elder, a respected newsroom executive and editor at the paper, would "build an operation" to seek philanthropic funding.
The Times' move is predictable and notable. Bosses there know that despite the startling increase in its paid digital subscribers — it has more than 2 million digital-only subscribers, in addition to 1 million print subscribers — it hasn't come close to making up for the revenue lost from the decline in print advertising and the near-duopoly on digital advertising by Google and Facebook. . .