times company creating a wine club (link)
08.13.09 - the ny times
if we learned anything from the final season of the wire, it's that it's a hard knock life out there for newspapers. it's damn near impossible to get kids these days, with their blips & their bleeps to read a magazine let alone read a newspaper. heck, even i, in my mid-thirties, use the ny times' iphone app. i download my content for free in the morn & evening, read it on the subway home & ignore the ads at the bottom. plus, no ink on my hands. i hope they're generating some revenue from it, because it's a complete win-win for me. in fact, i can't even think of the last time i bought a physical copy of a newspaper & i wasn't in an airport.
um...so as the um, ny times reports, the ny times company announced yesterday that they're starting a money-making venture--the new york times wine club. members of the club will get "a selection of wines at two price levels, $90 or $180 per six-bottle shipment, and customers can choose to have wine delivered every one, two or three months." it's something that a few newspapers are already experimenting with & the ny times probably figured they have to do something fast. as the ny times notes, "revenue at the new york times company has been falling." both ad revenue & overall revenue fell during the second quarter & they've been trying to dump the boston globe (which has been destroyed as a newspaper during their ownership) for a while now.
in case you're feeling a bit weird about the fact that the times is doing an article about the times' new wine club & feel that there's something odd going on there journalistically, you don't have a thing to worry about. the ny times is serious about keeping editorial separate from money-making. take this example. the times spoke with tom carley, the times company's senior v.p. of strategic planning & learned that "the venture is run independently of the times’s food and wine editorial sections." carley even mentioned that they were keeping them apart "so there would be no conflict or appearance that our critics were selling." the times does note, however, that "excerpts from wine-related times stories run on the side of the club’s web site, nytwineclub.com, and members will receive booklets of times recipes from its archive meant to be paired with each shipment of wine." it's probably nothing to worry about. for more on the new york times & the new york times company, please visit nytimes.com.