I also heard an appetite for further, bolder experimentation.
I spoke to two-dozen current staffers, on and off the record, and emerged with the impression that most are buying into the new initiatives, many of them pushed by the well-liked Thompson. Mindful both of the ways people read the paper today (digital subscriptions now approach weekday print subscriptions, and nearly half of digital traffic comes from mobile devices), and by which the paper makes money (advertising: not a growth area), they must sign up more subscribers and perhaps induce some subscribers to pay beyond what they do now.Ī key difference from 1976 is that the newsroom is generally on board. That has left CEO Mark Thompson and executive editor Jill Abramson to plot a new path forward. Cost-cutting its way out of the problem risks turning the paper into a journalistic shadow of itself, thereby defeating the whole point. But sustainability ultimately depends on cash flow, and revenues at the Times have declined for three years running. The Times Company’s quirky dual-stock structure means the Ochs-Sulzberger clan is less likely than The Washington Post’s Grahams and The Wall Street Journal’s Bancrofts to feel pressure to sell. Today, The New York Times is wracked by a new crisis, which, like that past one, stems from economics but must be solved partly through editorial strategy.
But the additions were cash cows whose spawn now feel as stubbornly natural to the paper as the Gothic logo and refusal to use the Oxford comma. Rosenthal, faced with the rising cost of newsprint, tasked his equally legendary deputy, Arthur Gelb, with formulating new sections to attract extra ads and readers to the newspaper and, as Gelb later wrote, “rescue the Times and secure its future.” By 1978, “SportsMonday,” “Science Times,” “Living,” “Home,” and “Weekend” were in place. Michael Kinsley's plan for The National Tribune Long Live The New York Times: A Special Package
0 kommentar(er)
