Mix Edward Albee with Alan Ayckbourn, add a pinch of paranoia, a twist of sexism and an outsize dollop of portent. Stir vigorously for days on end; then, like revenge, serve cold.
Yes, it's that giant Sulzberger stew of barbecued editor (aka New York Times hash) still obsessing the media world far beyond 620 Eighth Avenue. But enough… who, frankly, can stay permanently excited about whether one managing editor understood that he was going to get a female partner to sit alongside him sharing the same job title? Or that Jill Abramson didn't explain it properly? Too much dancing on a hatpin of botched human relationships. And too little attention to the real issue behind all the snarling: an issue that affects journalists right around the world.
The trigger for so much redundant mayhem was a sombre report on the NYT's future from a committee headed by the publisher's son. It's a core document (especially when read in tandem with a parallel examination by Leo Watkins of Enders Analysis). Simply – and swilling aside its constant warm-bath self-congratulation – the message is clear enough, the writing scrawled high on the wall.
Of course the digital figures, featuring the most famous metered paywall in global publishing, sound great: 799,000 online-only subscribers and 950,000 print subscribers who've opened digital access, with digital advertising itself recovering a scrap. Overall, NYT revenue from digital has moved from 5% to around 20% over the last 13 years. Hey: here's a buoyant company on the move.
Look leerily closer, though. That paywall brought in $149,135,000 in 2013 – just 9.5% of a total revenue figure of $1,577,230,000 – while digital ads scored $162,878,000, a 10.3% slice. But old-fashioned print circulation revenue was $675,142,000 (42.8% share) and print advertising $503,809,000 (31.9%). In short, digital hasn't yet come close to staunching the long-term decline in print-oriented cash, with print weekday sales averaging a 7% slide over the last five years and print ad revenue down 47% since 2005. Oh! and ads will drop in the next quarter as well.
So far paywalls offer, at best, a respite that helps balance the books and compensate for ad decline. But the physical product, priced ever higher, is shrinking; and the prospect, one fine day, of sustaining a New York Times by digital operation alone is as yet vestigial. Remember, digital subs rates haven't moved since 2011 and now lag behind Fleet Street (some £60 a year in the case of the Daily Telegraph).
Maybe the ship is a bit more stable than it was when a Mexican telecoms billionaire had to row to the rescue. Yet you can't disguise the inexorable squeeze and the inevitable challenge. So, says that Sulzberger Junior committee, we need a newsroom audience development team, plus a newsroom analytics team, plus a newsroom strategy team. Our rivals are already far down that path. And we must do "a better job of recruiting, empowering and promoting digital talent" – even if, in the maelstrom of change, "some new roles may exist for only a few years".
Those thoughts about empowerment et al can be put less roseately. Aron Pilhofer (the NYT head of interactive news just poached, post-Jill, by the Guardian) complained recently that "journalism is one of the few professions that not only tolerates general innumeracy but celebrates it… It's hard to get a journalist to open up a spreadsheet, much less to open a command line." But it's also pretty difficult – at the New York Times or far more widely – to find the basic figures that matter most: detailed assumptions about profit and loss, present or pending.
How many extra bottoms on future seats, charting audience development, analytics and strategy, will the paper need? Where's the correlation between investment (in people and functions) and returns, between clicks and cash? The Huffington Post – lauded by the Sulzberger report for a digital audience surpassing the NYT – is still only promising to make a profit later this year, a full decade after its birth. An ever-expanding workforce, now 700 strong, needs paying, after all. We'll see how BuzzFeed copes as that contender passes $120m revenue a year, paying 500 staff: but they'll need to keep running hard. Mail Online, with its soaring global audience, has also seen its cost base soar: total revenue take is up 45% for the first half of this year to £28m, roughly a tenth of the Mail and Mail on Sunday's overall revenue for the period.
It's a slog. Yes, you can make money from journalism online if – like Vice or Vox – you can play digital news magazine rather than newspaper: if you pick and choose what you do and keep costs under control because you don't try to do everything. But there's the rub.
No one argues that new teams and new functions aren't critically important. The problem for the New York Times is whether those teams are add-ons or replacements, and whether the newsgathering operation itself must take more hits in the process. That's a familiar dilemma for Dean Baquet, Jill Abramson's replacement. He quit as editor of the Los Angeles Times as his newsroom shrank and shrank again. He knows that news, real news, is labour-intensive. He knows that presentation and distribution need original content worth distributing. And so the crunch comes.
There are those (say the brilliant Professor Emily Bell, once of this parish and now a Scott trustee) who don't think that integrating print attitudes, print people and print disciplines for a digital age can work: in other words, that even the New York Times, in traditional form, is doomed. Perhaps digital first means nothingness last. There are those (say Watkins from Enders) who are deeply sceptical of finding magical cures in video or the ingenious reprocessing of material: small bells, small whistles. There are accountants who wince every time they compare the price of a digital ad with its print equivalent and ponder the sheer structural impossibility of building a profitable full news service on such a base.
We can all talk the transition talk, in short. But paying for it – the language scrawled in red ink or black – remains a far different thing. Watkins winds up by wondering whether subsidy by very rich men (see Jeff and the Bezos-ification of the Washington Post) isn't the only true route to the future. But then, you'll have noticed Amazon shares plunging 25% since 1 January and one verdict on that performance sending shivers through the market. "Although Amazon reported revenue of nearly $20bn, its operating income fell 19% to $146m… Perhaps more unnerving was the company's forecast for the next quarter: flat revenue and a loss that might be as big as $455m."
The quote, appropriately enough, comes from the New York Times. Those figures on the bottom line still count – for good and ill and everything. So it's hardly surprising that we've wallowed along with Jill, Dean and Arthur these past couple of weeks. Personal loathing flows so much more easily than revenue streams.
