What if Quality Journalism Isn't?

baekdal reporting:
By now you have probably already read the leaked Innovation Report from The New York Times. And if you haven't, you should. It provides a great overview of the challenges and thinking that are happening in the industry, not just for The New York Times, but for every newspaper and magazine.
To very quickly summarize it, The New York Times has had a ton of success with its digital subscriptions, but despite that, is facing a continual decline in digital traffic.
And like all other media companies, they blame this on the transformation of formats and a failure to engage digital readers.
They say the solution to this is to develop more digitally focused 'growth' tactics, like asking all journalists to submit tweets with every article, be smarter about how the content is presented and featured, and generally focus on optimizing the format for digital.
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But let me ask you this. If The NYT is 'winning at journalism', why is its readership falling significantly? If their daily report is smart and engaging, why are they failing to get its journalism to its readers?
If its product is 'the world's best journalism', why does it have a problem growing its audience?
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What if the real problem isn't digital? What if the problem is the journalistic work itself?

http://www.baekdal.com/insights/what-if-quality-journalism-isnt/10C3F189EE6048BBB4D5CB448CE6F069DAC6C08B6F9E7F72EF24FC33EAC1F946