NY Times Praises The Atlantic's Transformation to Profitability, Then Demonstrate How They Don't Get It
I love stories about traditional businesses in the middle of significant disruption that respond by reinventing themselves in alignment with the disruption. The New York Times piece on The Atlantic finally turning a profit after a decade of losses is one such story. Desperation breeds change and The Atlantic responded by imagining themselves "as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company.
I encourage you to read the story of their transformation, but I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw this paragraph in the middle of the story:The strategy is not a cure-all template for troubled media companies, of course. The Atlantic, a tiny enterprise compared with vast corporate magazine empires like Time Inc. and Condé Nast, has only about 100 business and editorial employees and a circulation of 470,000. A scale that small means that a few million dollars could push the company over the top — an amount that would barely register on the balance sheets of many other publishers.
The author defines the business by the number of employees and the (print) circulation! Two metrics that are being completely challenged by the internet disruption. I read into that statement, "While we really think this strategy is cute for a small publication like The Atlantic, it would never work for a massive institution like the NY Times". I am not saying the strategy should be exactly the same, but the NY Times should be thinking along the lines of, given this market disruption, how would a Silicon Valley start-up disrupt us.Thinking you are different because you have more employees and a higher print circulation when those metrics are from increasingly irrelevant business models tells me they have a long way to go. Main question from my perspective: Who's income is increasing and who's is decreasing?
Credits:
I discovered the story from GigaOM
Other interesting reading on this topic
Mediactive by Dan Gillmor
