Semafor’s Ben Smith: NYT Is ‘the Winner of the Nationalization of News, Local Press Everywhere Is the Loser’

SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah, I mean, so, Ben, since you wrote this book, it — as Jonathan was saying, the situation has gotten tougher and tougher, more fragmentation but also more failure. You look at what happened over the past year, from The L.A. Times” to The Messenger to you name it, it seems one business, whether it is traditional newspaper or whether it’s website-based, one after another is falling. A couple questions. One, why is it that The New York Times seems to only be getting stronger? And two, what is the lesson from all these failures for the startups of the next few years?”
Smith: “You know, in some sense, the big story is the decline of local. The New York Times is getting stronger, in a sense, because why would you read The Los Angeles Times or The Cleveland Plain Dealer when you can just as easily get The New York Times? And the same way as something like search engines, you know, the rich get richer, the best platform gets more data and more money and gets better. In some sense, The Times is the winner of this kind of nationalization of news, and local press everywhere is the loser. The way in which the industry is shrinking, the real thing that is hitting the news industry, isn’t tech journalism or media journalism, or business journalism — it’s local news. That is just continuing to get decimated and eroding this very baseline foundation of news gathering in America. And I think those of us who are trying to build new things. Like us at Semafor, being very careful, very focused, in a way that’s not totally unlike television, actually, on the voices of individual journalists who can connect to people, who may be a little skeptical of the institutions. But I do think that None of us are chasing at the kind of scale that we were, for instance, at Buzzfeed.”