Yesterday in the Times there was an Op-Ed about creating an endowment that would save the NYTimes and pay for its operations. In other words, turn the paper into a non-profit organization. It’s not a bad idea and one I’d like to see examined and vetted. It could work. In theory.

Then today, there was an idea proposed on PJNet to turn the NYTimes into a cooperative. Or at least, to turn its newsroom into a cooperative.

If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times paid $400 a year, just for it online, but also got shares into the cooperative, that would be $400 million a year. The Times newsroom costs about $200 million a year to operate. The extra $200 would go into an endowment, so in five years there would be a billion dollars, in ten years $2 billion. Enough that the subscription rate would go down for anyone who contributed for ten years. A ten year investment would be $4,000 or $2,000 less that what you pay for the newspaper now.

Nice idea, but I have my qualms about it. Sure, I’d like to be an owner of the NYTimes newsroom, but what’s to keep me from doing that now? I can buy stock in the company.

More importantly, I’d like to know what the shareholders would control and how? In my experience, co-ops are big messy things with a lot of competing interests all trying to make things happen they way they want them to. But often, little actually gets done, and what does get done, gets done slowly.

I’d much rather see it as a non-profit a la the NPR model.

One commenter on the post brought up The Seattle Times and the PI. Who would buy into those co-ops? They’re not The Grey Lady after all.  Plus, in Seattle, we are often the victims of too much process (see our inability to get light rail built until now). If 300,000 of us all owned the newsroom, I’d see one issue a year after all the arguing about who to hire as a reporter.

I exaggerate to make my point, but I think you see my it anyway. This is an important question at the national level (The NYTimes) and the local level. A lot of folks seem to think local blogs can take the place of major dailies in each city as long as there is some sort of pool reporting on the bigger issues (government, police, etc). But I am not so sure. Most local bloggers are commenters, not reporters. God love em, they’re not taking the place of a newsroom with all the assets and contacts they bring to the table.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.