Sulzberger Has Been Promising for 11 Years To End Printing of NY Times

Mediaite reports today that NY Times publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has announced that “We will stop printing the New York Times Sometime in the Future.”  He made the statement at the WAN-IFRA’s 9th International Newsroom Summit in London.

It matters that Sulzberger just said this. But is it news?  Not really.

Set the way back machine to February 2007.  There was a lot of buzz over the comments Sulzberger made at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying:

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either…. The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

He went on to say that he really doesn’t view the Times as a local paper. Instead he sees it as a national paper that is based in New York, a paper that has more readers outside the city than within it.

Sulzberger’s comments were quoted everywhere from FishbowlDC to Eat The Press to the National Review’s Media Blog to Pajamas Media to Common Sense Journalism. (And a lot more places I’m not bothering to list…) (These links come from a post in 2007.  Don’t know if they all still work.)

But as I noted back in 2007, this was old news even then.

Sulzberger was part of an Advertising Ageroundtable back in September of 1999 in which he was asked about the future of theTimes. He answered:

“I don’t care how they get it 100 years from now. And the key is not caring.  It goes back to knowing the audience, and being, not ambivalent, but agnostic, rather.  Agnostic about the methods of distribution.  Because we can’t afford to be tied to any production process….  There will still be communities of interest.  There will still be a need, both socially and politically, for  common and shared experiences.”

Here’s the news: The publisher of the New York Times has realized for at least 11 years that he is no longer in the business of putting black ink on white paper and then selling it to people. Instead, the New York Times is in the news business and the ad sales business, and the NYT is going to keep delivering news and advertising in whatever forms it is profitable for them.

One more example of Truth 4 – Nothing’s new.  Everything that happens in the past will happen again.