Good luck with the job: New Yorkers' tips for Mark Thompson
Matthew Wells
contributes to a range of British media outlets from his home in New York.
UPDATE (14 Sept): Donald Trump has responded to our request for comments about Mark Thompson's prospects in his new job with this message:
It’s one of the few global media brands that can rival the BBC. But, unlike the Corporation, the NYT is afloat on the cruel seas of the free market. Revenue ticked up just over 0.5% in the second quarter, to $515m, but its net loss was just over $88m, continuing a trend that’s been going on for years.
So how do New Yorkers rate Thompson’s chances as he prepares for the riskiest cultural leap of his career?
The author, journalist and former media business executive Michael Wolff was blunt. “In a way it’s a great job, because there’s nothing you really can do to fix the place. And on top of that everybody will be happier if you don’t try to do anything,” he wrote by email.
“On the other hand, something is going to happen, something must happen. It will be big and transformational. If I were Mark, I’d try really hard to figure out what the big thing is going to be.”
Wolff concluded: “So he should just be going to a lot of dinner parties. That’s where the future gets written in New York.”
British-born Nick Denton, publisher of the highly influential and avant garde Gawker websites, responded to my request for advice for Thompson: “Break the Guild (the journalists’ union). Rebuild the site around community? But he’ll do neither of those things.”
Another Brit, based in the more rarified environs of the Columbia Journalism School, is Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. As the Guardian’s former digital chief, she got to know Mark Thompson pretty well during the 2000s. “Thompson has the right credentials and mentality to fit in at the New York Times,” she writes. “He might even have the right skills for some of their transformation.
“But the company has to let him do the job. It is a really waterproof institution, rather like the BBC. We don't know how outsiders fare at the top there because their usual policy is to promote from within.”
One Manhattan-based newspaper man, and one of British journalism’s longest serving foreign correspondents, David Usborne, the Independent’s US editor, has known many British businesspeople come and go from big jobs in New York. “I would tell him to imbue the news pages of the NYT in particular with a dash of British journalistic salt,” he writes. “The NYT is so in awe of its own patrimony as a serious organisation, it sometimes forgets to have a sense of humour.”
“Above all,” says Usborne, “be cheeky: do what it takes to rattle authority. Short, of course, of tapping the White House spokesman’s voicemail.”
The New York Times Company has gradually thrown unwanted assets overboard, including a stake in the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC, and is now focusing on a multiplatform future centred round its main newspaper titles – the New York Times, Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune.
The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh reported at the time of Thompson’s appointment last month that the DG’s pitch for the job was “to emphasise the importance of video journalism, and of taking a professional approach to… production”.
So make it more like the BBC, then? That might be one way of recognising the reality that all media are now chasing the same digital future with the same problem: how to maintain quality but make more content with less income.
Sabbagh extracted a satisfying quote from the NYT’s own media-beat guru, David Carr, which no doubt sums up the hopes of everyone in the newsroom on 8th Avenue and 40th Street, and the rest of the Times’ 5,500 staff: “The days of provincialism around geography, or platform for that matter, are long past. This guy has shown an ability to build and manage news enterprises at that scale.”
One of my own few encounters with the DG involved the two of us riding the lift alone at Television Centre some years ago, where he broke from what looked like an intense bout of mental problem-solving and helpfully offered to push the button for my floor.
He won’t have the chance to do that in the stylish but architecturally cold corridors of the NYT building: it has the most confusing, keypad-free elevator system yet devised by mankind.
In common with the BBC, the NYT’s unique geography, design and security culture separate the insider from the outsider more acutely than anything else.
If he hasn’t done so already, my advice to Thompson would be to master the lifts – and pronto. Devote the first morning to it if necessary. The rest will surely follow.
