NYTD's Len Apcar on About.com acquisition

Len Apcar, editor in chief of New York Times Digital, just made these comments to the Harvard/Nieman Foundation "Whose News?"  conference about the Times' acquisition of About.com:

"I’m ecstatic we bought the times because it shows The New York Times is not a newspaper company. Marketwatch, About, Slate say we are starved for pageviews, we need a growth engine because we cannot grow the business fast enough. About is a totally different kind of business. About is good at two things the NYT is not. The first is cost per click advertising, which probably is going to supplant display advertising. Which is a huge problem if you’re [many of us in this room]. The second is search-engine optimization."

"The distributed content model of blogging and the walled garden world of newspaper and cable and network Web sites are going to have to come together in some kind of coherent, profitable sense. We don’t quite know how. I’m putting out all the content of the NY Times every night and it isn’t good enough."

To put the latter into context, Apcar's first comments to the group were, "I think the stakes have never been higher. As optimistic as I am about this medium I think the stakes are quite great. Can this medium support the great newsgathering organizations that big media has built?" More here.