'NYT' Digital Czar: News Cooperative's a Possibility

If David Carr's pie-in-the-sky scenario of newspapers banding together to save themselves -- and anti-trust laws be damned -- were become reality, it would without a doubt require the support of the industry's most influential player: Carr's own New York Times. To hear Times Co. digital chief Martin Niesenholtz tell it, that's not out of the question.

As part of the paper's "Talk to the Newsroom" series, a reader asks Niesenholtz whether newspapers have "considered getting together and forming a cooperative newspaper site (for example, newsline) where people would have to pay a monthly subscription fee (similar to cable) to access the articles that member newspapers/blogging sites/magazines published?"

Niesenholtz:

The kind of cooperative you suggest is certainly a possibility, particularly as more and more publishers question the advertising-only model. I can easily imagine such a venture taking shape among many newspapers. The one thing I would question is your assumption that "all newspapers are losing money by offering free content online." We believe this has been a successful model for some newspapers.

(Uh, which ones would those be, again?)

He also fields a question on whether the Times might bring back a paid-content model in some form soon. Niesenholtz:

Today, we continue to carefully analyze the question of how paid content (subscriptions, micro-payments, membership tiers) can augment our core advertising business. The trick, of course, is to garner incremental revenue from the user without significantly cannibalizing the high rate ad pages that now account for a very significant amount of money. Unlike many local news Web sites that still depend mostly on declining classified ad revenues, NYTimes.com has a very large national display revenue stream. As we develop new pay-for-content ideas, we must carefully balance our ability to generate meaningful dollars from both sources.

Translation: We're hoping someone else figures it out real soon and we can just copy their model.