The Death of the New York Times

It's not quite the fast-tracked death knell that Michael Hirschorn, in the January/February Atlantic, declared "plausible," but the New York Times's Thursday announcement that it would be cutting "the pay of most employees by 5 percent for nine months" left the noisome impression of embattlement bordering on desperation and made real the possibility of the imminent dissolution of the printed Times-maybe not quite by the doomsday deadline of May that Hirschorn predicted (with admitted hyperbole), but soon.

The rise of the Internet as a news platform-along with its dominant business model, free-has exacted terrible damage on newspapers, and in these days of evaporating assets and moribund markets, the only bar graph that can outshine the contours of the Dow Jones or the S&P 500 in sheer gruesomeness, in precipitous plunges unmitigated by upswings, may be the State of the News Media's chart of newspaper circulation declines, with the percent decline falling almost linearly from about zero percent per year in late 2003 to nearly 5 percent by September. The State of the News Media report, conducted by the Pew Research Center, showed stark numbers for 2008: a 16 percent drop in total news revenue, a 10 percent cut in newsroom jobs (5,000 full-time employees), and an 83 percent drop in "the stock of publicly traded newspaper companies."

Compared with the starkness of Pew's data, the New York Times's most recent pay cuts seem, on the surface, almost mild. But this comes on top of prior cuts; between 2006 and 2008, the Times cut its newsroom by 15 percent including 100 employees in 2008. The recent cuts will give employees 10 days extra leave, and the newspaper also announced Thursday that it would be reducing its budget for freelancing and "doing away with the expanded index to the paper [to save] several million dollars annually on newsprint."

These new changes will certainly lower quality; the only question is by how much. But, as Richard Pérez-Peña notes in the New York Times's article on their cuts, the paper still "has the largest news staff of any paper in the country." For now, the Times will remain the preeminent newspaper in the country and will maintain their extensive coverage of national and foreign affairs. As Charles Baudelaire once said, "we descend into hell by tiny steps." So it will most likely be with the Times's print edition, as it ends not with a dramatic closing but by a slow decrease in quality and an increasing inability to make thinning resources fulfill the promise of the paper's name.

In the online version of Pérez-Peña's article, the Times' Web site features an informational graphic meant to be a helpful and topical addendum to business pieces. As the topic of the article is the Times, the graphic reads: "Add to Portfolio: New York Times Co." In this market, I think I'll pass.

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/media/27times.html