What Will Work Like Cooking and Games If You Aren’t the New York Times?

The answer requires knowing your audience.

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Perhaps the biggest success story in publishing in the last decade has been the New York Times’s ability to effectively subsidize its news operation by extending the subscription bundle through offerings it built or bought in cooking, consumer product recommendations, games and now (they hope) sports. In his recent memoir, Marty Baron said the result was a “seemingly insurmountable competitive gap” between the Times and his own Washington Post.

There’s increasing recognition of the advantages of this approach in an industry where growing revenue derived from readers—whether through subscriptions, membership or donations—has become imperative. This week I want to talk about what the practical implications are for those who may seek to emulate the Times’s success. I think the opportunities are more widespread, and more accessible, than has been generally understood so far.

the possibilities are endless

Most of the work, however, lies ahead. Very few competitors have even begun to roll out the new initiatives that will be required.

Audience interests beyond news

At a conceptual level, as I recently told Jack Shafer and his readers at Politico, the key is to think about interests beyond news that unite your particular audience. Investing in some creative and rigorous research can help figure this out, but I hope a look at what to me seem missed chances from the past, and one or two current efforts, may help spur some thoughts.

In the mid-1990s, Paul Steiger, my boss at the Wall Street Journal, and I were struck by the success of USA Today Baseball Weekly, which offered acres of statistics, over many pages of fine print, about our favorite sport. It was the perfect companion—and provided a key impetus—to the rise of fantasy baseball. What, we wondered, might we create in the world of business and financial information—the Journal’s bailiwick—along similar lines? We had a couple of ideas, one centering on mutual funds, in which investments were exploding, but could never persuade our corporate bosses of the potential.

As things have played out, I see huge missed opportunities here, not only for the Journal, but also for USA Today. Had its parent, Gannett, managed to parlay their Baseball Weekly into a leading position in online fantasy sports itself when that business began to emerge in 1995, it might have built a meaningful cash generator—and been poised for a huge bonanza when fantasy sports morphed into online gambling in this century— a business into which various news organizations are now belatedly entering. Would such an early move have been enough to stave off the grip of the Fortress hedge fund, which is now suffocating what remains of the company?

Could this have been an entry point for online fantasy sports or even gambling?

In business and finance, similarly, a Wall Street Journal Mutual Funds Weekly might have provided an entry point into the online stock trading business that exploded in the late ‘90s. Had we gone down that road, the Journal today might not be owned by Rupert Murdoch. Even if you disagree on these specific historical what-ifs, I hope you won’t miss the larger point about thinking deeply about the wider concerns of the audience you have already attracted.

What’s happening now

Turning to more contemporary situations, a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the Local News Summit mounted in Charleston, South Carolina by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and Aspen Digital. Two presenters there, one new and small, another well established and venerable, talked about how they were, each in their own ways, looking to build businesses along these lines.

In Marfa, a town of fewer than 2000 in West Texas, Max Kabat, the newish owner of the 98 year-old weekly Big Bend Sentinel, has opened The Sentinel, a coffee shop and event space. In Atlanta, where Andrew Morse has been publisher of the Journal-Constitution for a bit over 13 months, one of the shared interests beyond the newspaper itself that he and his team have identified is Black culture, which is embodied in the publication itself in a section (and newsletter) denominated Unapologetically ATL, of which a new version is coming shortly and from which new products are being developed. In the right communities, it’s pretty easy to imagine a host of other possibilities, including businesses built around fishing or hunting or gardening, all of which are among America’s leading pastimes.

These kinds of brand extensions can be built, but it may be quicker, once the right arena is identified, to also make targeted acquisitions. Thus, the Times’s purchases of Wirecutter in 2016, and Wordle and The Athletic in 2022. My own guess is that this is what Sir William Lewis, the new publisher of the Washington Post, was talking about when he made a reference to possible acquisitions in an interview with Semafor (even while refusing to utter the name of his rival). (By the way, I don’t think others should concede the realm of online games to the Times: there are zillions of possibilities here, and new ones can be crafted, just as both Wordle and Connections were in recent years.)

Extending brands in this manner won’t work for everyone. It may be harder for some subject matter verticals, although, paradoxically, easier for trade publications. But I think it can and will be increasingly important in local publishing, while also offering opportunities nationally for those who are creative and willing to experiment. Above all, this new arena is yet another reminder of just how crucial it is in publishing today to deeply understand your audience.

Correction: This post originally misidentified the hedge fund effectively controlling Gannett these days; it is Fortress, not Alden.