The New York Times is on the brink of a radical transformation this summer, reports Joe Pompeo on Politico Media.
A team of seven Times journalists led by economics columnist David Leonhardt is carrying out a strategic review, Project 2020, on behalf of executive editor Dean Baquet.
It follows Baquet’s memo to staff last month in which he warned that the newsroom “will have to change significantly — swiftly and fearlessly.”
These were necessary, he wrote, to ensure the paper was not “left behind” in facing up to the challenges of modern newspaper publishing in the digital age. Cost-cutting, including a further loss of jobs to reduce the 1,300-strong editorial staff, is forecast.
The Times’s decision in 2011 to charge people for access to its website resulted in more than a million digital-only subscriptions and nearly $200m (£149m) in revenue last year.
But, writes Pompeo, “the water is rising again and those numbers must grow. Soon, the Times is likely to hit a ceiling on how many people in its existing audience it can convert into paying subscribers. If it can’t get more money out of the same customers, it must find new ones.”
He points out that with readers turning increasingly to mobile devices, the newsroom has remained print-centric, driven by a daily obsession over what stories will appear on the front page.
Now big changes are afoot. Pompeo quotes metropolitan editor Wendell Jamieson as saying that “everyone in the department’s gonna have a new job.”
The central change is said to be the creation of a “print hub” to reconfigure where editorial content is published in the print sections and how that relates to what is published online.
Pompeo quotes Susan Chira, one of the Times’s four deputy executive editors, as saying: “There’s a new generation, whose preferences and tastes are very different than the way the Times has always seen itself.”
And that new generation is asserting itself within the paper alongside members of the the fifth generation of the Sulzberger family that controls the paper, including Arthur Gregg Sulzberger.
A veteran Times source told Pompeo: “Their desire for change is so apparent... They are in charge of the digital revolution.”
Source: Joe Pompeo
