joshuanguyen:

So much fun with these crazy cats: markcoatney ginag 

I gotta tell you, I’ve look at this 20 times and still have no idea what we are trying to sing.

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I was a little bit surprised that the report didn’t spend much time tackling the hardest issue, which is why do they need to have so much revenue? It’s because their cost structure is made for print. When you look at how much revenue comes from print and the scale of their operation because of print, the challenge that they’re facing moving forward is how do they move into a post-print world….

It just seems like if you’re reading a secret internal report for The New York Times, the things that people would be stressed about, isn’t that, oh, the website’s not good enough, or they haven’t moved fast enough with this feature or that feature, but more like how do we deal with this very different cost structure of our future business, compared to our past business.

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Finally getting to Felix Salmon’s really great Medium interview with Jonah Peretti. This point about the NYT innovation report was absolutely my reaction. That said, the problem is that the cost structure is both the most vital thing to address, and at the same time the one thing that never truly will.