The New York Times is going to be revising their newsroom and they have big plans by the time 2020 rolls around. They want to reduce duplicative layers of article editing, stop covering the same stories by different writers, focus on diversity as a way of ensuring that the paper’s journalists reflect the audience they seek and scale back on the print edition by 2020.
The Times has started to internally evaluate the newsroom and will be making some drastic changes within the next three years. The primary focus will be a “smaller and more focused newsroom,” but added that the reconfiguration should be viewed as “a necessary repositioning of The Times’s newsroom, not as a diminishment.” An announcement about downsizing in the newsroom will come in the first half of the year.
Many of the initiatives in the new report are already underway, including a reimagining of the print newspaper; an aggressive international expansion; a heightened emphasis on graphics, podcasts, video and virtual reality. The report affirms The Times’s commitment to its subscriber-based revenue model, a departure from many other publications, both traditional and online, whose businesses are built on page-views, visitors and clicks. “We are, in the simplest terms, a subscription-first business,” the report says. “We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are not trying to win a page-views arms race.”
Likely the most important news out of the report is that the Times plans on really dialing back on the print edition and focusing more on digital. This is being done because in a digital world, they can respond better to the daily rhythms of the news cycle.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
