outside the building. I once saw him at a conference in Germany, and
it was like seeing a giraffe on the 6 subway line—it just didn’t fit.
As you might guess, I didn’t have any luck convincing the board to
dump the CEO, Janet Robinson, and replace her with Eric Schmidt, a
man with a deep understanding of the intersection between
technology and media. I was basically laughed out of the room. No one
wanted to take on the CEO and Arthur. And since I was a newcomer
with no credibility, it was easy to quash the idea.
This was several years before a tech CEO took over an ailing
newspaper. In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. That had
the salutary effect of eliminating the quarterly freak-outs, when the
paper would unveil sinking numbers to investors, soon followed by the
inevitable bloodletting in the newsroom. More than providing
financial ballast, Bezos turned the Post toward the web with a
vengeance. Its online traffic doubled in three years, leapfrogging the
Times. And the Post developed a content management system that it’s
now leasing to other news outlets. According to the Columbia
Journalism Review, this CMS could generate $100 million a year.^24
WaPo is benefitting from the same blessing as Amazon: cheap capital
and the confidence to invest it aggressively, and deftly, for the long
term, as if they were eighteen again.
My fellow directors at the Times Company had no stomach for this
type of agita. It was a lot easier, they concluded long before I came, to
confront the online challenge by acquiring an online player and
extending its model to the web.
About.com
In 2005, the New York Times Company purchased About.com—a
growing set of sites, hundreds of them, that provided readers with
specialty information about everything from pruning trees to prostate
therapies.^25 It was what was known as a “content farm.” The success
formula for content farms was to engineer the sites with one
overriding goal: leverage user-generated content that was optimized
on Google, appear on the first page of Google search results,
generating traffic, and thus sell advertising.