#New york times breaking free

That the Trump campaign ‘may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS’. This coverage planted the seeds of Trump’s 2016 victory - but he was not the only one to profit from it.ĬBS’s executive chairman, Les Moonves, said

#New york times breaking free

Trump is estimated to have received free coverage worth around $2 billion, six times more than any of his rivals in the Republican primary received. Trump’s antics in the 2015-16 campaign were catnip for a flailing industry. As he trashed the class norms of politesse that the press expected from a presidential candidate, the liberal media couldn’t get enough of him. But the relationship between the press and Trump was symbiotic: Trump capitalised on the widespread feeling that the journalists chronicling American life looked down on regular people (he was not wrong). As a candidate, Trump attacked the press as ‘the enemy of the people’, used the term ‘fake news’ and called She was given the boot.Īnd then came Trump. The executive editor at the time, Jill Abramson, resisted strenuously. Journalists were asked to accompany advertisers to conferences and were pushed to collaborate more closely with the business side, something many of the old-school editors were loath to do. The paper hired an ad agency to work in-house and began allowing brands to sponsor specific lines of reporting. The Times invested in new subscription services like NYT Cooking and NYT Games, and introduced live events, conferences and foreign trips. ‘Innovation’ presaged a new direction for the paper of record: become digital-first or perish.

But it was something else entirely to suggest that journalists should be collaborating with their audience to produce ‘user-generated content’, as the report put it. Of course, journalists have always been aware who their readers are and have catered to them, consciously and unconsciously. Should be ‘encouraging reporters and editors to promote their stories’. The ‘hard work of growing our audience falls squarely on the newsroom’, the report said, so the Times To compensate for the ‘steady decline’ in advertising revenue due to digitisation, ‘the wall dividing the newsroom and business side’ had to come down. A journalist’s job, the report said, no longer ended with choosing, reporting and publishing the news.

The report made it very clear who was to blame. Sulzberger, who was getting ready to replace his father as publisher, commissioned an in-house report, its title ‘Innovation’. It was a risk, and at first it didn’t seem to be paying off: after a challenging 2014, the company shed 100 people from the newsroom in buyouts and layoffs.Ī.G. The gamble was that readers would want to pay for quality journalism. In 2011, the Times erected a paywall in what it called a ‘subscription-first business model’. The New York Times entered the digital era under duress.