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And the Times is considering these complaints and accusations with increasing care. For instance, Rove did not need to berate Keller over the phone or during an interview--it was after Keller had explicitly asked Rove (over cocktails) what he thought of the Times’ coverage that Rove launched into a tirade over what Keller recounts as “Bush accomplishments [the Times] had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that [the Times] had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces [the Times] had done looking hard at the Bush record.”
Adam Nagourney, the Times chief political reporter, also has taken the criticism dished out by bloggers in good humor.

The increasing responsiveness--particularly to conservative concerns--may stem from a fear of alienating a broad swath of the American population that lives in the “red” states of the Midwest and South, rather than the metropolitan environment that the Times is so comfortable with. The Times not only has a business interest in serving this population as it expands its national distribution under publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (most recently including the addition of a contracted printing and distribution facility in Dayton, Ohio), but may also have a journalistic motivation for strenuously balancing its reporting as it fears that average Americans may be losing faith in the integrity of MSM outlets like the Times. Karen’s post on American high schoolers who feel that newspapers should be subject to government approval could represent one branch of this concern, but apathy is just as dangerous as people turn to more personal and custom sources of news that fit their own views and preferences.

Sulzberger seems to be preparing the Times parent news corporation, the New York Times Company, for this deflated MSM environment. In the words of the New York Times Company itself, it has “undertaken numerous multimedia, multi-audience initiatives in order to extend its brand globally.” One of the first such initiatives in the mid nineties was the creation of New York Times Television, which produces New York Times branded content for the Discovery Times network as well as material for “Frontline” and various elements of ABC News, including “Nightline," "20/20," and "Prime Time Thursday."

Around the same time as Times TV, Sulzberger also launched an online edition of the Times, which was one of the first major newspapers to do so, completing a set of what Sulzberger has remarked are three key skills in the news business: print, Internet, and video. While Times TV does not yet contribute significantly to the company’s bottom line, NYTimes.com has proven to be a windfall, earning $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004 and growing at 30 percent annually. Nearly all of that money comes from advertising that companies pay top dollar for in order to reach the web site’s 18 million monthly viewers.

Yet Sulzberger indicates that he may be inclined to switch NYTimes.com to a subscription-based model--not so much because he thinks that subscription fees would outstrip lost ad revenue due to fewer online views, but because (in Sulzberger’s words) NYTimes.com “gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free.” If NYTimes.com does turn subscription-based, it will be an interesting indicator of Sulzberger’s willingness to sacrifice profits in the short term in order to influence the public’s perception of quality journalism’s value--a move that also runs the risk of alienating its online audience just as it fears it may be alienating many conservatives.