These announcements by the New York Times are NOT the signs of a healthy, thriving newspaper:
The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.
The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs.
Several other American broadsheets reduced their size a few years ago, and many are planning further shrinkage to cut costs as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.
Reducing the “news hole” and laying off employees is not new to the industry. But that does NOT mean that the Times’ announcement that it will now be doing it — and apparently in a significant way — is NOT significant.
What this Times piece is saying is “Hey, everybody’s doing it!” This underscores the facts that (a) there have been industry-wide problems, as newspapers have seen a loss in the industry’s role and advertising revenues over the past 30 years due to changing reading habits, competition from television news, and the Internet and (b) the Times is ailing…otherwise it would not be taking these steps. But that doesn’t stop the spin.
The Times, which made the announcement last night on the eve of its quarterly earnings report, said it would sublet its plant in Edison and consolidate its regional printing facilities at its newer plant in College Point, in Queens.
That consolidation will mean the loss of about a third of the total production work force of 800.
The Edison plant, which opened in 1992, is to keep printing papers until the spring of 2008, by which time one new press will have been added at College Point. That plant opened in 1997.
The company said the changes would save about $42 million a year — $30 million by consolidating printing at College Point and $12 million by reducing the size of the paper. Leaving the Edison plant means the company can avoid about $50 million in capital improvements there, although it will spend about $150 million to combine the facilities in College Point and buy a new press.
The reduction in the size of The Times will mean a loss of 5 percent of the space the paper devotes to news. If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.
“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,� Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.
The Times story then notes that several newspapers “including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post” have reduced their size and that “others, like The Wall Street Journal, are planning to.” And Keller says that although it’s “painful to watch an industry retrenchâ€? these measures are “a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau.â€?
Clearly, the industry and — the Times — have seen better times.
The Times may now have to change its logo to “All The News That Fits — Into A Smaller News Hole.”
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.