Cyrillic Partners

Howell Raines, former managing editor of the New York Times, opines on the newspaper’s dubious business future unconvincingly in a column in Portfolio Magazine.

He lays out a thin case against being bought out by Rupert Murdoch citing the “jolly pirate’s” use of newspapers and broadcasting “…in a broadly unprofessional way—as political muscle to advance his commercial interest.” There’s no mention of any examples of such behavior, of course, Raines assumes that everyone following the debate feels the same way he does.

I submit this counter argument: If Murdoch is so bad for journalism, why do people still read the papers his company put out? Does he really have the time to throw his weight around by strong arming journalists and editors?

At least one may still trust stories in the Wall Street Journal to be accurate. Raines, as readers may remember, was fired from the NYT for his inadequate oversight of the Jayson Blair fact fabrication and cheating scandal. His “argument” against a Murdoch buyout demonstrates the same loose attitude toward facts that got him fired.

But maybe I’m being to harsh on the guy. It’s obvious he’s living in an outdated paradigm where the New York Times still anchors information trafficking. He writes: “There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times…”

I offer five other, more important questions for American journalism.

Ignoring the fact that ethics and accuracy should have been a more important issue for him during his tenure at the NYT, it’s worth pointing out that the NYT ($2.93B) is smaller than The Washington Post ($6.28B), USA Today publisher Gannett ($6.99B), or Reuters ($7.42B). To be sure, lots of people read it, but fewer than USA Today or The Wall Street Journal. It’s important to journalism like Ford Motor Company is important to the auto industry.

It’s barely worth eviscerating each of his suggestions for an anti-Murdoch NYT future: sell to Google, sell to Bloomberg, focus on just the New York Metro area, replace the board, or go private.

• Google isn’t buying the world’s information, it’s organizing it.
• Why would Bloomberg want the NYT? His company has been focused on data and real-time news: not stuff the NYT has a real lock on. Better bet for Bloomberg would be spinning out some of the financial data assets from McGraw Hill, such as its CapitalIQ product.
• Focusing the Washington Post on Beltway politics makes sense for D.C. but what would a New York-focused publication focus on? New York is too diverse for such a parochial scope. Still, focus is good and the NYT might profit from doing it.
• Replacing the board with pro-journalism people might be an interesting short-term strategy for preventing a takeover, but it doesn’t seem to be a long-term tenable strategy.
• Raines is right when he says going private would have been more likely two years ago. It’s no secret that the buyout business is taking a hit thanks to the credit crisis. But the buyout business isn’t just about leveraging businesses anymore, or streamlining by selling off unnecessary assets. There’s got to be some operational opportunity for growth that somehow can’t be realized under the scrutiny of quarterly earnings. I’m not sure what that would look like for the NYT, but I can’t imagine a PE firm giving the company more free reign than the Sulzberger family…

Raines needs to get off his soap box and exit his echo chamber.

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