Thursday (Tonight US time) is going to be a big day for the New York Times and for legacy print media companies – there’s the company’s second quarter financial figures that will be released (late tomorrow night, Sydney time), with analysts looking for another solid quarter for subscriptions and a small profit or loss.
The Times – along with the Washington Post and to a lesser extent News Corp’s Wall Street Journal – has seen a surge in subscriptions – upwards of half a million or more since President trumps’ election last November 8.
That has pushed the Times’ print and subscriber sales to more than 3 million a day, a record, with over 230,000 subscribers.
Already we have had a result from a smaller US newspaper group – McClatchy which late last week revealed a $US37 million loss on revenues of $US225 million – and a 15.6% slump in print ads.
The Times company is looking to reveal another sharp drop in print ad revenues for the three months to the end of June. And normally that would have been it – to survive another quarter in the current weak market for print ads and continue to boost digital revenues towards the 2020 forecast of $US800 million a year, and at the same time, battle and beat the tweeter in the White House, would be enough to boast about.
But as the figures are being digested by investors, tomorrow is also expected to see the finalising of the number of editors to be retrenched – upwards of 50 is the tip – a move while it is another step in the newspapers’s 2020 survival plan, has split the paper’s newsroom, seen a stoppage by editors and their supporters and will leave a bitterness for some time to come.
That news will be welcomed by investors.
Like many other papers around the world – such as those owned by Fairfax Media and News Corp in Australia at the moment, the Times’ management is gutting and effectively eliminating the editing process as it has been for decades (In Australia editors are called sub-editors).
In the Times the editing desk has effectively run and controlled the paper, enforcing the paper’s style across all sections. The editors that survive the cull tomorrow (when the number of people whose contracts have been bought out will be known) are revealed will be re-located to the various desks inside the newsroom.
The paper’s 109 editors were invited to reapply for the small number of jobs that will remain after the cull – the others will have been ‘encouraged’ to apply for buyout packages, which are also being offered to an unknown number of reporters.
The money saved will be used to finance the addition of around 100 new reporters across the newsroom, so that the total head count of around 1,300 won’t change.
According to a report in Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-agony-and-the-anxiety-of-the-new-york-times) 70 of 91 buyout applications (requests for redundancy) have been approved, with 64 of the 109 editors being offered new positions. That’s nine more than the 55 the Times leadership have said they wanted to keep.
