The New York Times is sacking 100 positions in the news room due to the tepid customer response to all of the new apps the Times has released. The reductions are intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers. The Times is also phasing out NYT Now, a new app aimed at younger readers it had not proved as popular as they had hoped.
One of the bright spots on the wide array of apps the Time releases is NYT Cooking. It does not charge users for a subscription, but instead is trying to build a large audience before asking readers to pay. Two weeks after its official launch, the product had more than a million unique visitors.
“They are all experiments, which we are determined to treat as such: to learn, pivot and, where necessary, make prompt decisions about them,” the announcement said. “We believe that this process of exploration and experimentation is essential to future growth at The New York Times and we will continue to support and fund it.”
The New York Times currently has 800,000 to 900,000 subscribers with their newspapers and entire line of apps. Back in June they had 831,000 paying online readers to its main online digital newspaper subscription service.
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.