Sulzberger: We must invest in our newsrooms

From a Nieman conference on Public Interest Journalism: Winner or Loser in the On-Line Era comes a transcript of a conversation with New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (Thanks to @richard_grantfor the link.)

I’ve grabbed just a few lines as a taste, but the whole transcript is worth a read.

On engagement with readers

I think we shouldn’t pretend that we don’t already have a relationship with our readers, and that we don’t hear from our readers every day. Yes, it’s going to change. We all know that.

But it’s not going to go from no relationship to a relationship. If all of us, as journalists or as publisher produced only a Page 1 that we wanted, with no caring whatsoever as to whether it was of interest to our readers, I suspect we would be out of business very, very quickly.

On editorial judgement

We provide judgment, and the value we give is not merely in collecting the data, but analyzing the data and trying to fit it into all of the other data that we have, your Page 1 billboard saying, “In the judgment of the editors of this news organization, these were the key stories you must know if you want to be a fully-functioning human being in society.”

On providing value

The value is in what do we bring to the news? What are we bringing in information? Is it unique to us?

Our telephone call-up service, I think is the best possible example of what I’m talking about. When we went into audiotext a number of years ago and we put up a variety of audiotext options, opportunities — everything from sports scores to financial tables to breaking, sort of quasi-breaking news, to the answers to the clues in our crossword puzzle.

The only one of those that made money, and made a lot of money, was the crossword puzzle answers. Why? Where else were you going to go? We had the answers and you didn’t, and neither did NBC. And people called and called and called, and it’s just a nice little chunk of change.

That’s real value added, nowhere else to go. Okay, I got it now.

If you accept that, where should newspaper publishers be putting their money? In their newsrooms. They’ve got to be funding their newsrooms to a greater and greater extent to try to capture information that is not available anywhere else.