The Future of the 'Times': Two Views

It's easy to criticize New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. It sometimes seems like his leadership of the paper consists chiefly of commercializing the paper's brand (eg. launching "Thursday Styles" and the T magazine franchise), or taking measures long after their necessity had become obvious (eg. cutting the dividend, borrowing against the Times building), or both (eg. putting display ads on the front page).

But rather than find fault, the New York Observer today chooses to celebrate Sulzberger as one of its "Media Mensches" of the year. For all his history of bumbling, says the Observer, Sulzberger proved a steady hand in the midst of an industry-wide crisis: "All over newspaper land last year, newspaper owners were stampeding over the cliff in a mass panic. And Mr. Sulzberger, unlike every single other newspaper boss in the world, didn't pillage or dismember his paper."

(Uh...Aren't we forgetting someone, maybe? I guess you could make a case that Rupert Murdoch's radical makeover of The Wall Street Journal constitutes a dismemberment of sorts, but in terms of raw headcount he's definitely more Arthur Sulzberger than Sam Zell.)

And Sulzberger's greatest success is still ahead of him, says the Observer, thanks to the Times's relatively forward-thinking digital strategy: "Whenever [the] day comes, that one day that everyone in the newspaper world is praying and clinging to, the day when those Internet pennies turn into dollars, it's Mr. Sulzberger who has a Secretariat-lead on every other big paper."

Meanwhile, Michael Hirschorn, writing in The Atlantic, is less impressed with Sulzberger, or at least with his strategy of using advertising-friendly "lifestyle fluff" to subsidize serious newsgathering. "For a time, this fluff helped underwrite the foreign bureaus, enterprise reporting, and endless five-part Pulitzer Prize aspirants. But it has gradually hollowed out journalism's brand, by making the newspaper feel disposable."

Hirschorn -- who thinks it's "plausible" that the Times could go out of business as soon as May of this year -- envisions a less straightforward future for the paper as a digital entity, as

a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting. This combination has allowed the HuffPo to digest the news that matters most to its readers at minimal cost, while it focuses resources in the highest-impact areas. What the HuffPo does not have, at least not yet, is a roster of contributors who can set agendas, conduct in-depth investigations, or break high-level news. But the post-print Times still would.