NYT Rumors of the Dot Calm Era Are Exaggerated

Posted on June 20, 2007
Filed Under Web News |

Sunday’s New York Times said that the growth of commerce on the Web was experiencing a “dramatic slowdown,” and noted that “Internet fatigue” was setting in with consumers. It was a sky-is-falling article, but even on its face it was hard-pressed to make a case.

Our friends at Threadwatch broke the news for me in my manor, and they debated whether the NYT people really understood that ecommerce slowing down from “rocket-launch speed” to merely “incredibly fast” didn’t justify the gloom and doom the reporters were putting on the story, nor the conclusions they were forcing out of the available data.

As commenter bluecorn said in the TW thread:

you have to admire their gumption for trying to get a down spin to stick on those numbers.

Over at ZDNet Joe McKendrick, whom I like, and read all the time, took the NYT at face value and played the “Internet Fatigue” meme in a Sunday story. But by Monday he’d had a chance to look around, and he filed a new story citing IDC, and headlined No Sign of Internet Fatigue.

The IDC Press Release of one month earlier, on May 17th, that Joe cites was titled: “IDC Says the Digital Marketplace Has Reached a Tipping Point and Will See Double-Digit Growth Rates That Cannot Be Ignored”

Well, that’s okay then. As bluecorn pointed out in his comment, and as we’ve covered here, the owner of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, has said that the paper Will Abandon Print for the Web. Sulzberger said, “The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

Funnily enough, dated the same crazy Sunday, June 17th, John Jansch over at Duct Tape Marketing (another good one) posted a piece called I Think The New York Times Gets It, in which he preambles with this:

It’s sad to see how hopelessly lost many print newspapers are as they grapple with how to hang on to the changing way in which news is created, reported, and, certainly, consumed.

But not the New York Times, says John, obviously impressed by the newspaper’s release of a handy tool - the Times Reader - that lets online readers see the digital version of the paper with the same formatting that readers of the print version are used to.

It’s true, the Times does get it. And even though the Sunday story did coin a nice term with “Dot Calm era” - a phrase which is even now still spreading, uncorrected, across the Web - the newspaper is busily preparing the ground for its eventual complete relocation to the Web. That’s a vote of confidence in my book.

-Ross Hunter

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