I’ve been around long enough to have once marveled at the improbability of the fax machine — that can’t be real! — but I like to think of myself as modern. Which should mean that I’m a big fan of disruption, but that depends on who is being disrupted, doesn’t it?
I read on Friday that the price of taxi medallions in New York City had fallen about 17 percent, a drop created by competition from ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. The impact is remarkable because neither company possesses big capital assets, or a huge number of employees. Instead, they put a new user interface over cars and drivers already on the road. In the same way, Airbnb has remade the rental markets, not by buying properties, but simply by surfacing available units on the web to people in need.
In both cases, inefficiency was reduced by using software and smarts to create a new market of underused assets — and consumers have benefited. (Perhaps not in ways that will continue to pass regulatory muster, but that’s a longer story.)
I work in an industry that has also been profoundly disrupted. The shift of news and information to the Internet meant that the heavy investment in trucks and presses that once served as a barrier to entry disappeared. Insurgents flooded in with new approaches that eliminated much of the inefficiency and created whole new streams of content. Again, great for consumers, not so great for the traditional news industry, because those inefficiencies were also profits by another name.
Right now, The New York Times is in the middle of a round of buyouts in an effort to cut 100 positions, to stretch existing revenue over a smaller cost base. The packages are generous — three weeks of salary for every year worked for union employees — and those who have been at the newspaper for at least 20 years are eligible for an additional payout of 35 percent of the total severance.
Buying out those folks — layoffs will follow if the goal of 100 jobs is not met — also allows the organization to invest in new technologies and the people who build them.
The Times, which has been disrupted from without, is doing some disrupting from within, striving to make sure that articles are visible on the web and resonate on social media, that we have advertising that merits something besides commodity prices, and that our video journalism will reflect our news values while meeting the changing needs of consumers. Even with the cuts, we will be about as large as we’ve ever been, with new faces and new skills. It’s all good, right? Well, not all of it.
I work closely with a few longtime employees who are considering the buyouts.
• The Wayne Crawford award …
Inaugural winner Matt Smith with journalism legend Wayne Crawford and his just-launched award … TT searched for an online story about the award but came up empty …
AND,
• Wikipedia: Metropolitan Police role in the news media phone hacking scandal
