The Business Side

Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey offers the following:

Was Vivian Schiller interviewing with NPR on Oct. 23, the day that Standand & Poor's Corp. lowered the New York Times's debt rating to junk status? Few know. But it's plausible, and that would sum it up, wouldn't it? The woman who led NYTimes.com to its place as America's best daily newspaper web site walks out the door in 19 days -- and her soon-to-be former managers just don't need this kind of bad news. The Times already must come up with $400 million by May 2009 in order to comply with terms of a revolving credit agreement. Even the mighty NYT can't get that kind of cash without usurious rates that will cripple it further. It doesn't help that advertising is down 13.7 percent year-over year in the New York Times Media Group -- and that was before the recession really kicked in.

Meanwhile, a long-time supporter of (a) the Internet and (b) public broadcasting -- some guy named Obama -- will reside in the White House for at least another four years. His Congressional muscle, Rahm Emanuel, is rested and ready to go. If you were Vivian Schiller, which operation would you like to be running -- NPR or the New York Times?

Silicon Alley Insider has posted both the going away and the welcome Vivian memos, from NYT (via Gawker) and NPR (via PaidContent) respectively, and both are an interesting read.

The Technology Implications

We love what Schiller has done at the New York Times, from getting rid of the subscription pay wall last year to launching a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) this year for 3rd parties to develop mashups with. Perhaps the wisest decision made under Schiller's watch was to syndicate ReadWriteWeb onto the technology page of the Time's website. (We kid, we kid! We sure do appreciate it though!)

NPR is no web 2.0 slouch either, though. Last year that outfit launched a great mobile site (which we at RWW still use regularly) and an equally compelling music site that pushed the envelope on features that other sites launched much later. This summer NPR launched the first version of its own API and is seeking suggestions for another version soon.

NPR is a hot tech shop to be a part of and we look forward to seeing what the very accomplished Vivian Schiller brings to fruition there. What does this mean for the Times? It doesn't look good, but we look forward to seeing who takes Shiller's place there as well.