The latest example of the Times' strategy was the release in late
December of Snow Fall,
by John Branch, a multi-media extravaganza available in the newspaper, on the website with a
multitude of interviews and other video features, and as an e-book from Byliner at $2.99,
expanded in length but without the digital extras. Having read all the versions
of this beautifully written account of a deadly avalanche in Washington's
Cascade mountain range last February, I would have been satisfied with the text
version in the newspaper, which was enhanced with many sidebars
(mini-biographies of the characters, for instance), color photographs, and
graphics that did not turn up in the e-book. The online effort was clearly a
smash. In a memo
to the staff picked up by JimRomenesko.com, executive editor Jill Abramson
wrote that the interactive feature received about 2.9 million visits for more
than 3.5 million page views. "Strikingly," she wrote, "a quarter to a third of
them were new visitors to nytimes.com. . . . Rarely have we been able to create
a compelling destination outside the home page that was so engaging in such a
short period of time on the Web."
The Byliner e-book is the first in what will be a series of 10,000 to 20,000
word narratives intended to offer original content from leading Times writers, not necessarily also
appearing in the newspaper or online. Among those scheduled are Pulitzer Prize
winners David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief and business columnist
James Stewart, who has authored a number of bestsellers, including Den of
Thieves. As was the case with Snow Fall, these will be for sale on
every major Internet retailer as well as Byliner's own site and the New York Times Store. There has been no public
accounting of how well Snow Fall sold as an e-book, but what impressed
me was that it could be downloaded in so many ways, including from the Times'
own site, an indicator of the company's ability and determination to sell goods
of all kinds that expand the brand. Also in the works are collected articles packaged as TimesFiles e-books, a
partnership with Vook. For $1.99, I chose The
Fall of the Berlin Wall among the twenty-five initial offerings.
Another initiative with momentum are the events scheduled for the Times
auditorium. They are extensive, star-studded, and, I am told, starting to make
money from sponsorships and ticket sales as high as $1,500 for the recent
DealBook conference with top tier financial figures. All this promotional activity
is an enormous change from the New
York Times of the past. In the mid-1980s, fed up with the hassles of
managing a small book company, the Times sold Times Books to Random
House and showed little interest in a partnership, except for crossword puzzles.
(I was publisher from 1991 to 1996, and few of our books were collaborations
with the newspaper.) Times Books has since relocated to Henry Holt, a division
of Macmillan, and from there and elsewhere, books of all kinds are released
that are regularly promoted in the pages of the print newspaper and at the New York Times Store. Gradually, the
company has divested itself of its magazines, its classical music station, a
chain of smaller regional newspapers, its ownership of About.com, and even its
small share of the Boston Red Sox. The
Boston Globe remains in the portfolio, but I am guessing it would be
sold if there were a buyer, preferably local, willing to pay a reasonable price
for it. The International Herald
Tribune, long shared with the Washington Post, is now wholly
owned, and integrated closely with the home paper. It is regarded as a
meaningful extension of the global enterprise, apparently without demanding
enough cash to be considered a problem.
