NY Times to cut 100 newsroom jobs
The New York Times has unveiled restructuring plans which will see 100 newsroom jobs being cut as the newspaper seeks to control its costs.
The broadsheet also announced that it intends to close down a high-profile opinion app which has failed to attract readers since it was launched in June.
“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of the New York Times, but we know that they will be painful for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said in a note to staff on Wednesday.
A smaller number of jobs in the newspaper’s business and editorial divisions will also be cut, with the newspaper saying it will offer buyouts and move onto layoff if it struggles to get enough employees to leave voluntarily.
The organisation currently employs 1,330 staff, a slight increase from the 1,189 employees it had in 2011 and the 100 jobs to be cut account for about 7.5% of the whole newsroom team.
“We are reducing the cost base of the company to safeguard the long-term profitability of the Times, not because of any short-term business difficulties,” Sulzberger and Thompson explained.
Sulzberger and Thompson said NYT Opinion, a subscription app launched in June that offered readers access to blogs and editorials on the newspapers website for $6 a month, had attracted “early passionate loyalists” but it hadn’t attracted “the kind of new audience it would need to be truly scalable”.
“NYT Now is a terrific app and has struck a chord with younger users, many of them entirely new to the Times,” they said.
“However, our effort to define and market a lower-priced subscription offer on the web and core apps has proven much less successful.”
The Times’s CEO and the publisher said that their latest product, a cooking-focused subscription free app, had attracted over a million unique visitors since it was launched on 17 September.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve enjoyed different levels of success with different products. They are all experiments, which we are determined to treat as such: to learn, pivot and, where necessary, make prompt decisions about them,” Sulzberger and Thompson said.
“We believe that this process of exploration and experimentation is essential to future growth at the New York Times and we will continue to support and fund it.”
Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, said the newspaper would now reconsider its strategy, in terms of content and in terms of the number of sections.
“I will use this as an opportunity to seriously reconsider some of what we do – from the number of sections we produce to the amount we spend on freelance content,” he said in a note on Wednesday.