Brill’s Plan to save journalism has holes.

Brill’s secret plan to save the New York Times and journalism itself – When it rains it pours – yet another titan of the corporate media model offers a scheme to “fix” the New York Times. In this memo Steve Brill puts his bias for corporate supported journalism on full display in a plan that rivals Mr. Isaacson for its sheer ignorance of developing and significant trends with regard to human information distribution and consumption.

In the interest of keeping this post brief I’ll just highlight two points that I think disqualify Mr. Brill’s argument. The first is his belief that the content of the New York Times is not fungible:

Free content ultimately sends the message that the content is fungible; if it is fungible, then the Times has no business paying as much as it does for its content other than to be an eleemosynary institution trying to stave off extinction as long as possible. The Times needs to act on the correct belief that its content is not fungible.

He offers nothing in support of this stance other than the fact that if the Times’ content was fungible they’d have to be nuts to pay what they are paying for it. Not very convincing.

What sort of content does the Times develop? In order for Mr. Brill’s plan to hold water the Times would have to have the sort of inside, professional class, actionable content that Bloomberg or even the Wall Street Journal has. Personally I don’t see that at the Times – to my eye they specialize in a more generalist, and indeed a more fungible style of content that revolves around politics, culture, and world affairs. While it might be smart, well written, well designed content that Mr. Brill would readily cough up fifty-five squids a year for, I’d rather just engage the wild and exciting creativity of the web for free.

The simple fact of the matter is that the average Internet user can certainly find free content on other sites that will suitably replace anything found on the Times. The writers and editors at the times – while very good at what they do – are not the only source of interesting and intelligent commentary, analysis, or narrative. The web is awash with divergent and exciting intellectual discourse that rivals anything found on the Times. If the paper were to disappear today it would be tragic and sad, but intelligent debate and analysis would most likely survive.

The second point – and this is where Brill’s bias toward the journalistic output of the Times really shows itself – has to do with his assumption that advertisers won’t pay to be a part of the Times but readers will. He notes:

Selling only the quality of the audience to advertisers cannot work for a general newspaper on line; for no matter how eagerly it seeks to deliver specialized content for vertical audiences, its search engine competitors for that advertising can always out-perform them when it comes to targeting and cost-per-acquisition.

It seems that Brill is trying to play both sides of the fence here. On the one hand the Times can’t compete with the power of search when it comes to selling advertising, but somehow they will be able to compete with search when it comes to selling content – even as their competition floods the market with a comparable free product.

Here Brill is betraying a rather alarming misunderstanding of the psychology and creativity of advertising. It is, if done well, content. A reader’s engagement with an advertisement on the New York Times is directly tied to the reader’s relationship to the Times. If that engagement is transferrable to the web at large, then it stands to reason that the experience the reader has with the Times’ content proper is also transferrable. So, if the Times can’t sell advertising, it can’t sell content.

In the final analysis Mr. Brill’s plan is just too nostalgic to be very workable. His assumptions are clouded by his fondness for the Times. In his mind it is a singular source of quality content and surely worth a few cents a day. He is vastly underestimating the nature, scope, and quality of the competition. He fails to see is that in such an environment of pervasive competition those few pennies a day will serve more as a roadblock than a revenue source.

Ultimately I do believe there is a path forward for the New York Times – and I do believe that they are making a lot of right moves. However, if they fall victim to antiquated advice they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Their only true hope is to let go of the past-prejudiced view of what it is they do and recognize that this is in fact a different world from the one they grew up in. Only if they can learn to see the realities of the day for what they are, and be willing to make the difficult decisions that are required will they be able to stay in the game.