How the New York Times neglects business journalism

Felix Salmon of Reuters writes about how the New York Times neglects its business news coverage when it tweets stories.

Salmon writes, “Give business stories a bit of promotion on the home page and on Twitter, in other words, and they’ll get you just as many pageviews as anything else, on average. But it turns out that the business section is systematically shortchanged by the people making those promotional decisions. Maybe (I’m not sure) because it has a higher concentration of wire stories.

“Again, this looks like strategic short-sightedness. Business-news pages are some of the most valuable on the website, in terms of the amount that the NYT ad-sales team can charge for them. (They’re so valuable, in fact, that the entire Dealbook section remains outside the NYT paywall, in an attempt to garner it as many pageviews as possible.) By promoting more business stories, even if they are (horrors!) wire stories, the NYT could make more money, and everybody wants that — including the readers, who have shown that they have more interest in such things than the NYT’s editors think that they do.

“What would be lost by such an approach? Very little: a few dining and metro stories might get viewed less often, if their promotional muscle started getting transferred to the business section. And maybe a few NYT egos might get a little bruised, if they discovered that their snowflakes weren’t quite as precious, to the outside world, as they liked to think, at least in comparison to the wire. But the website should be run for readers, not for journalists. And improbable as it might sound, it looks very much as though those readers would be best served if the NYT made it significantly easier to find wire stories, business stories, and — especially — business wire stories.”