Fascinating New York Times self-assessment

Get this while you can. The New York Times has done a fairly enormous study of its successes and failures in digital and at keeping print subscribers – and the whole report is online. I expected a PDF and instead it's a series of what looks like photocopy JPEGs and that makes me wonder how, shall we say, endorsed this online publishing is. Grab it now.

The Times is interesting because it has been so big and it has done so much and it has made a success of its paywall. Yet it is still struggling as all newspapers are struggling and this report reveals just how much. Most tellingly, just from the introduction, is the information that New York Times articles get read more on other sites or services such as Flipboard than on NYT's own. And that readership of the paper on smartphones has taken a little fall too.

But then the report is not without its unintentional moments of interest too:

The anxiety that filled the newsroom only a few years ago has mostly dissipated. The success of the paywall has provided financial stability as we become more digitally-focused. The sale of other properties like The Boston Globe has allowed the leadership to focus squarely on The New York Times. Both Mark Thompson and Jill Abramson have established themselves as willing and eager to push the company in new, sometimes uncomfortable directions.

Jill Abramson was forced out of her role as Editor this week.

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