The Four

I remember one board meeting in particular. A Times reporter had
been kidnapped in Afghanistan, and was later rescued by British
Commandos. During the operation, one brave soldier was killed. The
commander of the squadron wrote a moving letter to Arthur
explaining why the heavy price was worth paying—why journalism
matters. Arthur read the full letter to the board, pausing regularly to
let us reflect before continuing. Journalism, sacrifice, deference,
standing, geopolitics, ceremony. This was the giraffe on the plains of
the Sudan woodlands feeding on the intermittent vegetation of
edaphic grassland and acacia. Arthur was in his element.
Meanwhile, as we relished in the importance of, and sacrifices
made for, journalism, Google crawlers entered our basement and
scraped all our content from our servers as New York Times directors
dined seventeen floors above in the seventh tallest building in
America.
Google not only was crawling our content for free, it also was
slicing and dicing that content for its users. When people were looking
for a hotel in Paris, for example, Google would link to a New York
Times travel article on Paris. But at the top of the page it would place
Google’s own ad for the Four Seasons Hotel. The argument was that
this arrangement brought traffic to the Times. It could sell these
eyeballs to advertisers, who would buy banner ads. It sounded good,
but it was whistling through the graveyard.
Here’s the rub: as it was handling those searches, Google also was
learning—better than the Times itself—exactly what the paper’s
readers wanted and were likely to want in the future. And that meant
Google could target those Times readers with far greater precision and
make more money from each ad. As much as ten times more. That
meant we were exchanging dollars for dimes. We should be running
our own ads on our sites. What idiots we were.
Our sales team was average, and the business model was dying.
The one thing we still had of value was our content—and the
professionals who generate it. Yet, instead of making that content
scarce—shutting off and suing any digital platform that repurposed
our content—we decided that we should try to drive more traffic by
prostituting our content... everywhere. This was the equivalent of
Hermès deciding to distribute Birkin bags through walmart.com so