New York Times set to prune 100 of its 1,330 newsroom staff
04 Oct 2014
The New York Times Co has come out with lucrative buyout packages for its newsroom staff, especially for the better paid and more senior staff, to quit voluntarily, with plans to cut 100 jobs.
If the offer fails to attract enough volunteers, the company is likely to go for layoffs to further trim its 1,330-strong newsroom staff.
The voluntary exit scheme is being offered in other departments as well and New York Times Co expects to effect the job cuts by the end of the year.
In a memo addressed to the staff publisher Arthur Sulzberger and chief executive Mark Thompson, they are ''reducing the cost base of the company to safeguard the long-term profitability of The New York Times, not because of any short-term business difficulties.''
The newspaper is eying more revenue on digital news and is planning to offload a part of its editorial and business operations through buyouts, or if need be, through layoffs in order to downsize and control costs.
The memo, issued on 1 October, cited the rate of digital subscriptions from new subscribers, which increased in its third quarter at a higher rate than the second quarter.
Besides, the memo stated that growth could also be due to ''growth in smart phone and video, and the energy and commitment of our advertising team, we expect digital advertising to show approximately 16 per cent growth in the quarter, the best quarterly performance since 2010.''
The paper also plans to prune other areas, including closing down of a mobile application launched in June, originally meant to garner opinion content such as op-eds, blogs and editorials, dubbed NYT Opinion. The app had been unable to garner the caliber of audience needed to get it up and running successfully, the executives explained.
NYT is also trying out new applications like NYT Now to reach young readers. While the company plans to attract a bigger audience with the product before making it into a paid subscription, it does not have the financial strengths to try out several products and applications.
However, Baquet said, the NYT would continue to invest in digital technology as there were ''promising signs in digital advertising, and digital subscriptions''.
According to The New York Times, which posted an article on the company's plans to cut jobs, the cutback of 100 newsroom positions represent a loss of about 7.5 per cent of its 1,330 employees.
The company has reduced its headcount by more than half in the last five years. But most of that was due to divestment of parts of the business beyond the core New York Times - the biggest divestiture being its $70 million sale last year of the Boston Globe, which it bought for $1.1 billion in 1991.
The NYT has also cut jobs from across its business units, but tried to limit the cuts in the newsroom. However, digital hiring in the last four years have lifted its total newsroom staffing by about 200 jobs before the latest cuts were announced.
