Business Insight Zone

Today’s Company of the Day is The New York Times Company.

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The New York Times reigns supreme among the big American newspapers in terms of its reputation, the tenure of its publication, and even in the number of visitors to its Web site. But like the rest of the newspaper business, it faces a hard battle: figuring out how to make money when more and more readers are happy to get their news online — and from nontraditional sources like blogs — rather than in traditional print form. If it were only about the content, going online would present no problem, as the popularity of the Times’ site suggests. But while The New York Times Company long ago figured out how to turn a healthy profit from the advertising in printed newspapers, it still hasn’t mastered the trick of making money online, an increasingly urgent need as print advertising dwindles by the month.

Today marks a shift in the company’s online strategy, since it’s the first day in the post-TimesSelect era. For the past two years, the company put its historical archives and much of its current op-ed content — including prominent columnists like Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman — behind the TimesSelect subscription wall. The Times claims that TimesSelect had revenue of $10 million per year when they shut it down, a number that sounds better than it was because it doesn’t take into account how many page views (ergo advertising revenue) the company lost because the content couldn’t be accessed by search engines like Google. While Internet pundits have hailed the death of TimesSelect, the market challenges facing the company have led at least one Wall Street analyst to downgrade it from “neutral” to “sell.” Its reputation and business prospects may be better than those of Tribune Company and other rivals, but The New York Times Company still hasn’t figured out how to grow its business in an age that media historians may someday label “The Death of Newspapers.”