Sulzberger borrows a quote from us

by Elie Seidman on November 16, 2009

I recently wrote about the Titanic. Turns out that I’m not the only one with that large ship on his mind. Arthur Sulzberger -from the NY Times royal family and the current publisher of the New York Times – recently said:

“The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

  • I liked your Titanic-themed post. The problem is that your Sulzberger quote omits his main point. The cruise industry is still around, with something like $16 B in US revenue in 2005 and perhaps more profit than the airline industry! The key was that the industry realized it was in the business of entertainment rather than transportation. Even the Titanic was probably on the right track - it was more about the status of being on the boat than about getting somewhere. Trying to compete with a plane in getting from point A to point B would have been foolish.

    Sulzberger's making the same point about print (http://bit.ly/2KKgjG). It can't beat digital media at their own game - freshness, low cost, UGC, etc. - but there will be a place for it as an experience. The hard part is figuring out whether that'll just be first edition hardcovers and coffee table books or whether there will be more to it than that. Reminds me of something Fred Wilson wrote a while back about his family fighting over magazines now more than ever, despite the Internet being their main source of entertainment.
  • Great point - I very much agree. Boats did not disappear (nor did trains). Paper has a place as does professional journalism but I'd bet strongly that the size of the for profit journalism world shrinks dramatically.

    The thing that I can't get away from is measurability. If you can't measure it - it effectively does not exist and the problem with print - supported by ads - is that the advertiser can't measure the impact. Since marketers are, more and more, spreadsheet toting MBAs instead of the "artists" of Mad Men, any medium that wants to be ad supported but does not allow for deep tracking and measurement is doomed.
  • Totally with you on for-profit journalism, although I do find it a bit sad. I'm hoping the non-profit model works out. Not everything works well as a blog post (although there are definitely examples like fivethirtyeight.com that blow traditional journalists out of the water).

    As for the measurability, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Could you ever measure the impact of something like Apple's 1984 ad? It goes beyond impressions or even a spike in sales. Maybe you could track tweets, etc., as a proxy for brand engagement? I'd like to think there will still be a place for real branding. Having said that, I do think brand advertising needs to shrink massively or get much better. The vast majority of TV ads are still mind-numbingly bad and fall into Wanamaker's wasted 50%.
  • Wanamaker's rule is very very hard to get around when you go into the world of offline advertising. I do think that TV in particular will continue to be done and that print in magazines will be done - albeit in a vastly smaller number of magazines. What the makers of the 1984 ad did not have to deal with was a proliferation of other more measurable channels. Take the Apple of 84 and put it into the world of 2009 and I don't think that even Jobs would have had the courage to do that ad.
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