What more evidence do you need that the era when news was distributed on paper printed from cut down trees is winding down: the New York Times’ venerable publisher Arthur Sulzberger has candidly admitted that the Times’ printed days are numbered — and it’s likely to be sooner than much later:
The publisher of the New York Times acknowledged Wednesday that the newspaper will go out of print — eventually.
“We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD,” Arthur Sulzberger told an audience at a London media summit Wednesday.
Sulzberger’s statement came in response to a prediction that the newspaper would go out-of-print by 2015.
“This sounds obvious, but it’s a big deal,” Business Insider founder Henry Blodget wrote. “The economics of the online news business will not support the infrastructure or newsroom that the printed paper supports. Unless the New York Times Company can come up with a miracle new digital revenue stream, therefore, it will eventually have to be restructured and downsized (or sold to a deep-pocketed Sydney Harmon-type [sic] who runs it at a loss out of love).”
The Times will be an important domino to fall when it falls. And, Sulzberger has now candidly admitted, fall it will.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.