Is the New York Times Too Rich for Your Blood?

The death of Gourmet magazine is a big, sucking wound for all those consultants advising the panicked print industry to go niche, baby, go niche. As though we haven't been hearing that since the 1980s.

But even as we bury another paper publication, this one high end and historically choking with the most delicious verticals (food/wine) and attractive demographics, count on the New York Times to pick up the tradition of catering to the country estate crowd. Times' executives have clearly seen their own future and it consists entirely of penny-pinching, nervous, hundred-plus-millionaires.

We knew this just by peeking at the Sunday wedding announcements; I thought the VC and financial services industries back East were hurting but apparently they continue to partner and mate like voracious mice.

Then this past Saturday, the Times runs a story about the jittery net-worth elite where the writer "learned that the super-rich are just as concerned about the future as anyone else." Thank God we have company.

They're sleepless, the (figuratively) poor things, over the stammering economy, just like us.

Then I remembered that about a month ago the Times wrote another very long story about how "the "Super-Rich" are hitting "a Sobering Wall," causing some of them to downsize from palatial to merely extravagant. As the Times itself might determine in a typical paroxysm of self-reference, two pieces on the "super-rich" that close together in their pages must constitute a cultural trend.

Only the trend we can imagine here relates to the future of the Times itself, which is stewing in its own crock pot of debt and losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

So that's the new New York Times niche audience strategy: go WAY wealthy.

Even competitive New York media is confirming the intelligence of the Times' direction: New York magazine just ran an unofficial street survey, asking people, "If you've cut back your spending overall, why?" A huge 60 percent said they "just realized it was time to be smarter with their money."

Just like all those $500 million fretting net-worth types the Times has been profiling so assiduously.

This might also explain the Times' well-known and endlessly discussed secret plans to invade the Bay Area, supplying their own local news -- with or without billionaire Warren Hellman's help. The Times is hoping there is a luxury liner full of techno-kings, real estate barons and old money readers waiting for a serious publication designed just for them.

Don Fisher, who brilliantly understood the value of providing people reasonably-priced clothes, would probably crack a smile about this. And Warren? He's starting his own Bay Area news operation, with or without a relationship with the Times, where he's presumably aiming at an audience more like the heterogeneous crowd at his bluegrass festival than his fellow rarefied, top-level philanthropists.

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Comments

[larry278]

Perhaps this is relevant, San Francisco's papers & LA's papers are failing in the circulation & ad wars. The NYT sees a possibility that these papers will fold before the NYT folds. Sr Slim may loan the NYT money @ 14% or more if he sees a profit for him from the NYT's numbers. Sr Slim has excellent number crunchers. We may see the NYT's Northern Ca & the NYC's Southern Ca editions.
Sr Slim will watch the results that HP gets if HP publishes a LA & San Francisco section to join HP's NY, Chicago & Denver sections. Ms Huffington & her financial backers have a reputation for identifying the main chance, taking the main chance & succeeding in the way Ms Huffington, et al define & view of success.
No, I have no idea if HP will have Boston, Washington, DC, Miami & points west sections in the future.

[larry278]

The NYT survives because of a large loan from Carlos Slim @ 14%. Check Sr Slim's reputation on a few sites such as Wikipedia & Wikipedia's ideological rivals. Sr Slim likes to make money & he knows how to do it.
If Mr Murdoch's news businesses start failing & bleed $100,000 a week or, worse yet a day, Sr Slim will look at loaning News Corp & FAUX NOISE/BUSINESS some dinero at a fair (for Sr Slim) rate. Sr Slim could know more about making money the Rupert Murdoch knows & Sr Slim will know more about making money than his Rupertship's heirs know about making money.

[usedmg]

The NY Times is great at selling $10,000 watches. From the human interest stories in the Real Estate section about people buying multi million dollar Manhattan apartments to the sexless, sexist wan manequin spreads in the Sunday magazine fashion section, the paper caters to an imagined moneyed elite. For the Times, New York City stops at the East, Hudson and Harlem Rivers. It is the world of Bloomberg, a businessman whose terminals work the unregulated edges of the financial system, and whose politics skirt the two party system by buying both.

[GLHorton]

I'm very glad to be able to read the NYTimes free on line. However, if they charge for content I will go back to reading it every other week at the public library instead of daily. As a Starving Artist sort of intellectual I simply can't afford it: never could. When I was an adjunct teacher at a university I read one of the weekday copies that the university made available-- as did my fellow adjuncts. Only a Professor could afford a subscription.
The marketplace of Ideas can't be supported by a system that depends on advertising Stuff. People who are intensely interested in ideas for ideas' sake, like people who devote their lives to art for art's sake, simply aren't rewarded with salaries that can purchase a lot of Stuff-- and even if they did have the money most of the intellectuals I know (the poor to middle class ones) regard buying Stuff as as waste of their more-valua­ble-than-m­oney time.

[InofTouch]

that this story was about Frank Rich and what he did wrong. Nice to know it just about once a few pages a week about some headline reporting to make the NYT all about the rich :thumbsup:

[liblondmom]

I have been a devoted NY Times reader for decades, but my love of the paper has waned. Not because of the internet . Instead, it is because the NY Times editors has confused insightful, sophisticated journalism for "intelligent people" with topics focusing on the elite. I agree that the Times seems obsessed with the super-rich and has nearly neglected the lives and interests of the vast middle class of the NY Metropolitan area. Plus, the Times have virtually eliminated ANY coverage of the NY suburbs of LI, CT and NJ. I just can't imagine who they think their "typical reader" is. No one I know.

[josephXY]

The NYT and old money: the NYT was great in missing the subprime crisis, just like so
many others in the industry. For many years they just would in their brilliant ignorance
simply not understand financial derivates, because they were too complicated. Only when
the crisis blew up would they care to learn about those fancy instruments.
And logically readers were not doing that well lately, including the paper itself.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/media-news/where-was-media-when-sub-prime-disaster-unfolded/2854/

[adoantarel]

I was going to subscribe to the Times until I read that they took a loss for the year, yet their CEO got a raise. That didn't make me wanna shell out a couple hundred for such cluelessness.