b.j. says:

I think you describe everything exactly right. Assuming The Times needs to make some big changes, here are my suggestions, in no particular order:

1. Try to become a political journal in the sense of being able to cover state politics–and thus perhaps local politics as well–for all fifty states. They already cover New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and the surrounding areas to some extent, but why not try to build a team that can cover state politics for the entire country? Even if it slowly expanded at first, say from Pennsylvania and New Hampshire and then to Maine and Ohio, it seems more than possible that the paper could become a default national read for politics, both in a federal sense and in a state sense, especially as smaller papers fold and there is a void. There’s probably a lot of talent out there that would work for a pretty small salary, at least at first. Better yet, why not put all of this online, or at least most of it online, in order to teacher a younger generation of readers to look at The Times first?

2. Why not try something similar with business or technology or, to the extent it already doesn’t do this, world affairs? I’ve wondered why The Times didn’t make a play for the top journalists at The Wall Street Journal, beef up its business and finance coverage, and then make itself more of a national paper for general interest as well as business. It wouldn’t have stolen all of The Journal’s audience, but by hiring its talent and then loudly trumpeting this fact, it could have taken away a decent chunk of its audience and possibly become the nation’s top paper in overall circulation.

3. Why not steal a page from The New Yorker in two ways? First, why not have a team of reporters who could devote their time to whatever is they wanted–business, politics, the environment–and create those really detailed, really intense articles? Even if they had to be paid significantly more than the average reporter, it’d be worth it, if only to get the paper to become known as a direct competitor to investigative powerhouses. Second, why not try to become a forum where aspiring artists, both in old media forms like short stories and in new media forms like video, can try to get noticed? Assuming the server costs and editing costs wouldn’t be crazy, the cost of content creation would be on those submitting their work. If the paper could get quality submissions–and really, is there a reason to think it wouldn’t?–it could become a choice for the new generation of creative classes. Both of these areas of content, by the way, could be featured entirely online.

4. Why not go blog shopping? There’s a lot of talent out there that would be a good fit with what The Times already does well, so why not try to juice the numbers for the site by making these people contributors?

There are a number of things The Times could do in order to become even more of a powerhouse than it is now, but it looks like a lot of them require new revenue. That’s why, among other reasons, I expect the paper to start charging a small fee for online use as part of a larger “freemium” model. The potential to reinvest in itself is too large not to do so, I think.