They aren't trying, they are flailing around in desperation. When you start toggling all the levers to see if one of them works you've given up trying to understand and respond to the problem rationally and you're just hoping beyond hope that some darwinian mutation based process will save your bacon. Most of the time it doesn't work.
There is no easy band-aid fix for the disruption of the traditional news media. A successful "newspaper" equivalent in 2020 will bear little resemblance to what we consider a newspaper to be today. That alone should be obvious. But instead of changing with the march of history the NYT has decided to change as little as possible and hope that things work out for the best. They may stave off immediate doom but their plan is too shallow to stave off long-term doom.
I can't see how you could come to this conclusion, but I'll play along...
What do you envision the "newspaper" of 2020 will look like? HuffPo? Please. That rag is 75% unadulterated opinion pieces and biased claptrap.
To me, you sound like someone who is complaining that you're now going to be expecte do pay for a high-quality product that up until now you've been receiving for free.
I /pay/ for the WSJ, The Economist, and Forbes on Kindle. Before that option was available to me, I paid for those subscriptions to be mailed/delivered to my home. I'm /exactly/ the kind of customer that they want, because I have money to spend and I will hand it over if I find value. I think their advertisers appreciate the difference. Compare the quality of reporting between your average local "free" newspaper and the NYTimes (or almost any other major newspaper).
Personally, I applaud the folks at NYTimes. They've been dealt a tough hand and they are doing their best to stay relevant.
I too am willing to pay for relevance, but not for news as they are filled with the same stories, spin, stupid opinions and not nearly enough stories that actually matter (when was the last time the nytimes destroyed a politicians who had done something illegal?) are wetted by experts (witness the current comments about the neuclear stuff in Japan where very little is actually know but everybody is writing about it) and completely free of spin.
The problem with this analysis is that those issues are everything. You're basically asking the NYT to redefine itself from the ground up. That's fine. Except why wouldn't it be easier to just start out elsewhere from scratch. "I like that restaurant, it's pretty good. All they need to change are their prices, their decor, their selections, their staff, and their chef... then they'd be great!"
Let's back up a second. Why are newspapers being disrupted by the internet so severely? Well, for a while newspapers (and later local tv affiliates) were the only mass communication channels available. That put them in a unique position to serve as gatekeeper of news and information for a community, which allowed them to make money off of being a broadcast medium as well as their own original content. So newspapers were able to make money off of classified ads, rebroadcasted wire reports, comics, etc. This situation allowed newspapers to bloat up into huge organizations and make a lot of money off of little effort. The original investigative journalism within a newspaper made up a shockingly small percentage of their total efforts. The internet has made the broadcast functions of newspapers utterly obsolete, making the only economically useful function of newspapers their original reporting, which they do very poorly and also very rarely. Newspapers have a self-identification as this whole broadcast / gatekeeper enterprise, they have been having a hard time imagining they could be anything else (such as an organization that doesn't print classified ads, wire reports, or marmaduke comics).
If I knew what the newspaper of 2020 was going to look like I'd be building a business around that (and I may do so regardless). I know for damned sure that the newspaper of 2020 won't be dominated by material that is unnecessarily rebroadcast, and unfortunately that includes a lot of what's in the NYT today.
As for HuffPo, that's not a source of news, nor is it the future of journalism (it may not even outlast the NYT). As to "paying for a high-quality product" I dispute the notion that the NYT is anything of the sort. It's as much a rag as HuffPo, it's just a lot better at maintaining "production value".
Personally I think the future of journalism will be in smaller, more focused groups who are subject matter experts first and journalists not by training per se but by practice.
"It's as much a rag as HuffPo, it's just a lot better at maintaining "production value"."
Well then, you're in luck. The content you don't care about will not longer be free to you. Enjoy your full refund.
Seriously, I can't take you seriously if you don't suggest an alternative. Print and other broadcast media were the most efficient way to reach large numbers of people. The internet changes that somewhat because you no longer have (much of) a marginal cost to differentiate your information product. The long tail works for information products as well.
UNFORTUNATELY, this means that those things (classifieds, ads, coupons/inserts) aren't going to be available to subsidize the higher-cost things (investigative eporting, foreign bureaus). Craigslist and eBay did more to hurt newspapers than "bloggers" ever did. Free NYtimes content online was a way to stay in the game until they could figure out the new business model. Which they will or they wont.
What I don't get is your anger over this. Why do you care? Either they'll do OK or they wont. The only difference to YOU that I can see is that you'll no longer have access to that "rag" for free. You've already stated that you dont like the articles. It's clear to me that you're not going to be taxed on them either.
The rest of us who are willing to pay (because we find value) will probably do so. I'm thankful that someone else is willing to do the hard work and write this stuff up. I've got precious little time as it is and the premium I am willing to pay for smart, relevant content is some value substantially greater than zero.
The ideal is that these kernels of value (investigative journalism, for example) flourished under the subsidization of advertising. They reality is the opposite, they withered away while news media grew fat and lazy. It's easier to concentrate on reprints of family circle, regurgitated wire reports, opinion pieces, and facile human interest stories than it is to do the hard gum-shoe work of real reporting.
The internet has pulled the rug out from under newspapers by taking away the value of all that fluff, because broadcasting is now effectively free and ubiquitous. That means that the only substantive value newspapers have anymore (outside of tradition, which will only maintain for so long) is in their original reporting and the quality of their opinion. Even in the off chance that there are news institutions with substantial value in these areas it's unlikely that the public is willing to pay enough for that to also support paying money for editing wire reports and redistributing beetle bailey. But newspapers are generally fundamentally incapable of redefining themselves as anything other than the bloated institutions they've been, they would rather go down with "dignity" than to change who they are.
Why do I care? Because I care about the news and I hate to see it continue to be dragged down by these failing corporate behemoths.
I think the future of journalism is, as I said, in much leaner institutions who put the focus on the subject and the quality of reporting first, are not burdened by the bloat of outmoded institutional conceptions of what being a "newspaper" means, and who have financial incentives which align with the incentives to produce better reporting.
They're pulling 3 or 4 levers on this one alone. This package reminds me of Microsoft's strategy of Windows Home, Windows Basic, Windows Premium, Windows Ultimate, etc. etc.
