What Steve Jobs said about saving the NYTimes (video)

And what the New York Times has to say about that now.

Anticipating the relaunch of Apple News on Monday, friend-of-the-blog Jerry Doyle remembered this 2010 interview…

From Steve Jobs at D8, when asked whether saving journalism was one of his goals for the iPad:

I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers, myself. We need editorial more than ever right now. So anything we can do to help the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can afford to keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for…

What I preach is I don’t know what’s going to work, but I can tell you—as one of the largest sellers of content on the internet to date—one of the biggest lessons Apple’s learned is price it aggressively and go for volume… So I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print, because they don’t have the expenses of printing and delivery and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume.  Because I think people are willing to pay for content. I believed it in music. I believe it in media. And I believe it in news content.

Cue the excerpt (3 minutes):

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5tZ_84YyIM&w=840&h=473]

From Reuters’ New York Times CEO warns publishers ahead of Apple news launch:

Mark Thompson, chief executive of the biggest U.S. newspaper by subscribers, warned that relying on third-party distribution can be dangerous for publishers who risk losing control over their own product.

“We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else,” he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. “We’re also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix (blender) with everyone else’s journalism…”

A monthly digital subscription to the New York Times costs $15, and Thompson said he has no plans to give that up to participate on other platforms such as Apple’s.

My take: No good deed goes unpunished. Unfortunately for Jobs, the proof of concept of his theory of added-value journalism was Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only The Daily, which lost millions and survived less than two years. See: Murdoch kills The Daily.