As The New York Times ‘right-sizes’ its editorial staff, the death of print media approaches

from In These Times:



The Gray Lady’s Decline
As The New York Times ‘right-sizes’ its editorial staff, the death of print media approaches.

BY Kenneth Rapoza


The nation’s most powerful newspaper, The New York Times, faces a sixth straight year of profit loss. The unions are forced to save editorial jobs by taking salary cuts. How does one make a living in print journalism anymore?

As Mike Elk reported last month on this website, in an effort to trim its overhead costs, in December the company froze the pensions of its foreign citizen employees and threatened to cut their health insurance benefits. A frozen pension means the company will no longer be contributing to that employee’s retirement account. The company is trying to cut pensions across the board, for both union and foreign nonunion employees, from The International Herald Tribune in Paris to foreign citizen Times staffers posted worldwide. (Contract talks with the Newspaper Guild union continue.)

For those who care about good reporting, high-quality journalism at the Times–the kind that lets Apple CEO Tim Cook know someone is watching how his company treats suicidal Taiwanese factory workers–is not disappearing. There will just be less of it. And the people who report it will earn less. In some places, like The Huffington Post, curious news junkie freelancers might even do it for free. At this point in the history of American journalism, it’s all just a matter of numbers and time.

The Times is the Bank of America of American journalism. She’s too big to fail, but she’s listing with a cracked hull in a cold sea. The 589 people who signed a Newspaper Guild letter to Times CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on December 23 know this well. Sulzberger is “right-sizing” the paper, which means downsizing in market speak. Wages and benefits account for the bulk of the Times’ production costs, and they are falling. In the first nine months of 2011 ending September 25, the paper spent $373.1 million on wages and benefits, down from $376.2 million in the same period in 2010. Total revenues in 2011 are projected to be $233 billion, a 2.7 percent decline from 2010, when total revenue was $2.4 billion, even though the economy improved last year. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12706/the_gray_ladys_decline