Getty Fourth Estate Do Readers Own the New York Times Now? With its shift in business models, the paper of record will inevitably change to reflect its new masters.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

For more than a century, newspapers counted on two sets of customers to pay their bills—advertisers and readers. Advertisers historically contributed about 80 percent of revenue and readers the remanding 20 percent. This lopsided ratio, our leftist friends long preached, gave advertisers and corporations control of content and consigned journalists and readers to the role of passengers. Even if you disagree with them—and I do—they were on to something. He who pays the bills has a way of calling the tune.

But the leftist critique of advertising from the likes of Noam Chomsky, Robert W. McChesney and Ben Bagdikian pales when compared with the treatment Publisher E.W. Scripps gave the industry at the turn of the last century, as he was building America’s first big newspaper chain. “I recognize the advertiser as the enemy of the newspaper,” Scripps declared. Believing that a newspaper couldn’t honestly serve both advertisers and readers, Scripps routinely rejected advertising from companies like Standard Oil, department stores, drug stores or others he regarded meddlesome or who he thought injurious to the public interest. When a Seattle department store demanded the power to censor stories about lawsuits filed against it in Scripps’ Seattle Star, the Star’s business manager refused. The store pulled its ads, and Scripps congratulated his business manager.


Scripps’ anti-advertiser vitriol made him an outlier in the industry. Most publishers have accommodated the big ad clients—the car dealers, supermarkets, department stores and banks, who filled their pages with advertisements and their pockets with cash. But since the Great Recession of 2008, which with the advent of the web, brought with it a collapse of newspaper advertising revenue, newspapers have had to worry less and less about advertisers, mostly because so few of them remain.

The shift from advertiser-sustained to reader-sustained has been most stark at the New York Times. Two years after the paper erected its paywall, subscription revenue began to exceed advertising revenue. Today, print and digital subscribers account for 60 percent of the paper’s revenues, and those revenues are growing, erasing the adage that readers don’t and won’t pay for news. And all these new subscribers tend to be vocal about what they want and don’t want. Will this new arrangement alter what the Times covers? And can other papers ape its success?

In the old days, newspapers tip-toed around car dealers, banks and department stores lest they risk offending the one powerful person who might cancel millions in advertising. This power dynamic was recognized as early as 1909, as a Philadelphia North American advised readers to mistrust “what New Orleans says of sugar, or Pittsburg [sic] of steel, or San Francisco of fruits, or Chicago of packing-house products. And it is common knowledge that what almost every big New York paper says is an echo of Wall Street.” Newspapers never tip-toed around readers, though. If one or a dozen or 100 readers protested after reading an editorial or racy story and canceled their subscriptions, even the circulation managers would shrug. Relative to single advertisers, single or even dozens of readers weren’t that valuable to the franchise.

Now, that’s changed. A print subscriber to the New York Times contributes about $1,000 to the newspaper’s treasury a year, and when he cancels in high or even low dudgeon, the paper winces. Presently, the newspaper has several smoldering piles of reader resentment that could burst into reader boycotts. Last year, the editorial page editor James Bennet affronted the paper’s liberal reader base by hiring conservative columnist Bret Stephens, who keeps riling liberals with his work. This week, they’re fuming over the tweets of Bari Weiss, an editor and writer for the opinion pages, and they’ve succeeded in getting Quinn Norton sacked from her new position on the page just hours after she was appointed Tuesday. (It’s not just Times readers doing the griping about Weiss. According to a HuffPo piece, Times staffers took to one of the paper’s internal Slack accounts to wail about her work.) Meanwhile, smaller notes of vexation and fury have greeted the arrivals of libertarian Megan McArdle and neoconservative Max Boot to the Washington Post opinion pages.

As journalism scholar Michael J. Socolow reported several years ago, the Times op-ed page was designed from the start to infuriate its readers’ sensibilities. Early on, the page gave the megaphone to hawks like Gen. Curtis LeMay and Times-bashers like Vice President Spiro Agnew, and its editors accepted the bouquets from readers along with the brickbats. Untested under the new regime is what sort of tolerance Times readers have for political views they abhor. Will the stereotypical Times readers who worship Paul Krugman, Charles Blow, Gail Collins and the page’s other liberal fire-bringers get so angry about Stephens and Weiss that they’ll give up their daily hymnal? Or will the Times smooth out the rough edges for them? The paper’s timidity in the Norton episode—it got knock-knees and bid her goodbye after learning she used offensive language in the past and called a neo-Nazi a friend—doesn’t prove the page has no spine. But it doesn’t bode well.

If reader revenue continues to climb as a share of total newspaper revenue, editors might reconsider the areas they originally started covering to attract advertisers. Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans, a new book by Julia Guarneri, tells us that at the turn of the previous century, newspapers started branching out into coverage of beauty, fashion, food, cars, travel, real estate, gardening and the like not because of reader interest but because of advertiser interest. “These sections furthered advertisers’ goals not only by creating designated space for advertisements but also by turning people’s attention toward certain subjects and away from others,” she writes, pushing “consumer habits on news-reading Americans and turned readers into customers.”

The fashion, food, and entertainment pages at the Times still entice advertisers, so those sections seem safe for now. If and when those advertisers depart, newspaper might abandon that coverage. Or, they might split them off from the bundle. Presently, the Times offers subscriptions to crossword and cooking sections and apps that are separate from the newspaper.

How far are we from an advertising-free, reader-supported newspaper industry? I never predict, mostly because all my predictions have a way of not coming true. A century ago, Scripps unburdened himself completely from advertisers to launch The Day Book, an ad-free, Monday-Saturday newspaper for working-class Chicago. Scripps envisioned a national chain of ad-free papers for 95 percent of the population, but The Day Book flopped. Its peak circulation of 22,839 fell short of the 30,000 Scripps sought, and the paper folded in 1917, six years into its run.

The lessons of the Times’ success might not be transferable to other newspapers. It recast itself as a national newspaper several decades ago, which allows it to draw on a prospective market of tens of millions of potential readers. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, which have also cultivated national audiences, have a shot at making the transition, as does the Washington Post if mega-billionaire owner Jeff Bezos wills it so. But what of small town or even regional papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe? I would never say never, but I would bet against them morphing into national voices. But could they even attract enough customers in their environs as relentlessly local, reader-centric publications? Probably not. When Scripps attempted to do it in boomtown-era Chicago, he struck out. As newspapers go national they’ll likely abandon local coverage, or do like the Times and preserve placeholder-size amounts of local coverage to create the illusion that they published from some place.

For readers who value accountability news, the shift to a reader-centric news environment is no panacea. What if newspapers that chase the greatest number of paying customers end up giving their readers exactly what they want, and that exactly what they want is entertainment news, gossip, advice and sports? Might we look back on the tyrannical rule of advertisers as a golden era of journalism and curse the day that readers took the wheel?

“Newspapers are not waifs. They reflect their source,” press critic A.J. Liebling wrote in 1961. Now that advertisers are no longer the source, whose desires will they reflect?

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I am nostalgic for the reading experience produced by page after page of display and classified ads. Send entertaining ads to [email protected]. My email alerts think of themselves as this column’s “women’s pages.” My Twitter fancies itself a sports columnist. My RSS feed pines for the days that newspapers carried horse racing coverage.