All the news we can’t tell you about? Most publishers can’t even get Apple to acknowledge that it’s working on a tablet, but maybe the newspaper of record has more pull. In any event, its top editor is staying mostly mum.
You’ll be hearing about this most of the day, so best to take five minutes and watch it now: “The Daily Show” visits the New York Times.
The New York Times has already tried charging people to read part of its Web site. Now, like everyone else in the publishing business, it’s trying to figure out how to charge for online access again. The Times is reportedly mulling two options: A Financial Times-style “metered” approach and a Salon/NPR/PBS version whereby everyone gets free access to the site, but subscribers/donors get bonus goodies.
Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears. But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company saw ad sales drop 27 percent, and the Internet no longer helps: Web ad sales were down 6.1 percent. The company says to expect more of the same, for a while.
Last year, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told the newspaper’s newsroom that he would try very hard to not fire any of them. But he didn’t say anything about pay cuts. The Times today announced that it would be cutting salaries of its nonunion employees from 2.5 percent to 5 percent, and that it would be asking for “similar” cuts from its unionized newsroom workers “in a spirit of shared sacrifice and as a way to otherwise avoid layoffs in the newsroom.” It has also laid off 100 employees from its business operations.
The New York Times’s top editor says the paper is considering trying to charge people for a digital version again–and notes that some people are already buying one via Amazon’s e-book reader. Not enough to be meaningful, but it does prove at that least some folks will pay for stuff they can get for free.
For the last year and a half, New York Times columnist Marci Alboher wrote about other people’s jobs. Yesterday, she wrote about her own–the one she no longer has at the paper. Since she was a contractor, this doesn’t count as a violation of Executive Editor Bill Keller’s “no more layoffs, we hope” kind-of pledge. But the Times is going to have a hard time keeping its existing payroll intact.
Here’s a nice summation of the state of newspapers today: A pep talk to a newspaper’s staff now consists of a pledge not to fire said staff. That’s what New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told his charges yesterday, and even then he couldn’t make the promise ironclad.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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