David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Right, and I guess the question I'm really driving at here is can you similarly get people to fork over their money for neutrality and is driving them away that they're willing to. Again, the people, I don't think they're subscribing to Fox News. Well, I guess they’re subscribing to their cable bundle. Well, they're paying for it whether they know it or not. It's a good question. I think The Times would probably argue and certainly some people there would believe that that is what they're trying to do, or be the neutral highest quality news source across lots and lots of topics and that's worth paying for. I don't know but I suspect certainly a large portion of the five million subscribers they've added since Donald Trump was elected president have chosen to subscribe more for the niche reason than for the neutral reason. Yeah or at least if I had to sum up and try to embody the way that a lot of people feel who have subscribed in the last few years, I think I would say, I feel like there's so much untrustworthy misinformation out in the world. I am totally willing to fork over money for something that I know I can trust. The class of people who are saying that have their own bias. When they say that I know I can trust, it is inherently loaded language because you are more likely to trust something that represents the point of view that you want. It is impossible to be completely unbiased and reporting anything because you get to choose what to report. At the very core, that's true, but it is a really fascinating thing to try and understand all of the incentives of a subscription-based model, and figure out if that jives with the mission. That's a bear and bull. I want to paint this spectrum as we come out of narratives because I think there's this interesting decelerating excitement on the spectrum. The first thing you realize when you look at The Times is this is a killer subscription business that is growing 40% year over year in their number of paying digital subscribers. I guess paying subscribers broadly, mostly from the digital category. That is awesome. That is like a late-stage startup good. But it's only growing like 10% year over year in revenue. I really wish that was tracking the subscriber growth. Then three, you realize how. Total revenues actually have been flat the last few years and it fell over 50% from their glory days in the early 2000s. In some ways it's like a high growth company by looking at just subscribers, certainly not though on total revenue and their revenue glory days may have been behind them. If you're only looking at the surface level like this, you're going to get really disappointed unless you're believing the narrative that I mentioned earlier about you're holding up the sheet and they're fully reshuffling their cost structure underneath of it, and they're ready to explode in profitability coming out of this full rearrangement of the business. It's totally a compelling narrative but it is a wild realization. I was someone who started paying attention to The New York Times' business in the last five years. I have been all on board in the subscriber growth story and it is just crazy, like zoom out with a little bit longer lens and be like they used to make way more money.…

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