The New York Times wrote the story in 1853 about how Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery, but Gawker got most of the page views by publicizing the archived article when “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture in 2014.
This example of how the Times fails to capitalize on its rich content to build digital readership, relevance and revenues came to light in the leak this spring of a candid, unsettling and must-read assessment of the newspaper’s less than elegant effort to pivot from print to pixels.
Given the size of its staff, the sweep of its ambition and its stature as house organ to the world’s political, economic, academic and cultural elites, the Times is something of a unique case among newspapers. But its struggle to achieve scale and economic sustainability as a full-on digital publisher—as opposed to a legacy newspaper producing digitized renditions of an increasingly superannuated print product—is directly relevant to nearly every newsroom in the globe.
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