Does Fast News = Bad News?

New York Times chief executive Mark Thompson blames 24/7 news channels and the Internet for the decline in news quality at many news organisations. But the former BBC man isn’t joining the baying mob of “legacy” news publishers throwing stones at Google and Facebook looking for someone to blame for the news industry’s current problems. Instead, he’s “doubling down on seriousness” and “trying the produce quality”.

With the New York Times set to earn half a billion dollars from digital revenues his approach seems to be working. Speaking on a recent podcast, Thompson said: “We have done that not by compromising but by actually doubling down on investigations, great international news coverage, really thoughtful commentary and quality lifestyle and culture coverage as well.”

Comparing the New York Times’ success with many of his competitors, Thompson said: “The people I worry about are the legacy publishers and some of the new entrants who have decided to go down the middle and tried to be all things to all men and to try and build vast relatively thin audiences with clickbait and with jolly cheerful mainstream news – because there’s an awful lot of that available for nothing on the internet.”

He continued: “The kind of advertising that goes with that on the internet, you are competing with the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Google for that advertising. Those are tough guys to compete head to head with.”

Thompson believes that many news organisation have become too focused on scooping their rivals and rushing to break news stories and this is leading to a reduction in news quality.

Thompson said: “You’ve got this practical problem. You’ve got a journalist, do you want them to go out and find out what’s going on or do you want them to stand in front of a microphone and a camera to say what’s going on?

“How do you square that circle? How do you go on doing journalism? How do you go on having thinking time trying to understand what a story is and actually then presenting that story.

“It’s the acceleration affect of the 24/7 news cycle and what it does to media and what it does to stories.”