Despite our having written numerous articles chastising the New York Times, we started out with a great affection for the newspaper. From the moment we discovered it in college, we were excited to read it every morning. The paper seemed so serious, learned, and sometimes eccentric. We always got a chuckle out of turning to pages two and three (if memory serves), where were to be found exotic reports from nations in which the NYT, and only the NYT, invested in bureaus and correspondents. What’s going on in Lagos? — page two. We can’t forget the Advertising columns in which we learned of Madison Avenue: Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, Wells, Rich and Greene, Ogilvy and Mather, N.W. Ayer, Doyle Dane Bernbach, and so many others; DDB, BBDO — how can you tell the difference? We discovered quickly that business was reported in the Wall Street Journal and the sociology of business was reported in the New York Times — but we didn’t care. We loved the paper all the same. We still have many old issues of the Times, including that of Tuesday, October 20, 1970: “World Trade Center becomes world’s highest building — by 4 feet.”

Alas, those times are long past. We all know the saga of the sad decline of the Times franchise, though some of its reporting is still the best in the business. But the company’s silly ideology — eg, dunning John Roberts while the LAT and WaPo endorse the affable, summa Harvard grad, law review editor — has mostly trumped business interests.

The Times has been haughty in its disregard for shareholder interests. Indeed, as this space has detailed, the company’s corporate documents explicitly authorize the Times to tell its shareholders to go to hell. The company’s circulation in its home market has plummeted disastrously over the last decade — 26% — and the Times has fallen to third place behind the Daily News and the Post, but the Times covered up and obfuscated the matter through its reporting of national circulation. As long as advertising revenues were going up, these other factors seemed not to matter.

Not any more. Advertising revenues have stalled at the Times, and that apparently has triggered some significant measures of corporate responsibility towards the company’s shareholders, an elimination of 500 jobs, apparently its second job cut of the year. Editor and Publisher:

The New York Times Co. announced Tuesday that advertising revenue for the month of August increased 1.7% compared with the same period last year. Total company revenue grew 0.6%. Excluding About.com, which was acquired in March 2005, advertising revenue declined 1% for the month and total company revenue decreased 1.2%. Janet Robinson, president and CEO of the company, said in a release that the weak results were due to difficult comparisons. Advertising revenues increased 7.8% in August 2004 due to political and Olympic spending.

Robinson also reported that September — the company’s largest month in the quarter — would most likely be soft. “Advertising has been challenging and visibility remains limited. We continue to benefit from very strong double-digit advertising growth at our digital operations, particularly About.com. But elsewhere, advertising is weaker than expected,” she said in a statement. “To address this, the company is moving aggressively to reduce costs across all its business units.”

This afternoon the company announced that it will trim about 4% of its workforce, eliminating approximately 500 positions across all divisions.

45 positions will disappear in the newsroom in Times Square, and that is a serious and ominous message to the future of the company. We don’t expect too much to change at the Times too fast; indeed, we have written that the most enduring thing about a company that was once dominant is its unwilling-to-change culture. But the Times is now beginning to feel the hot breath of the marketplace, and this is a very good thing indeed. The apparent failure — or at least hesitant start — of Times Select is another prick at the balloon of complacency that has enveloped the Times (oddly, the Times tries to charge for the opinions of its columnists that are often available free in other venues).

We conclude on this note. Many people blame Pinch Sulzberger for the Times’ ill fortunes in recent years, and that is fair enough in its way. But the family that groomed him and sought fit to make him publisher of the Times in 1992 bears a large amount of the responsibility for the current sad state of affairs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, art, culture, business, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.