Notify the next of kin: The NYT is circling the drain

The New York Times, the venerable “Old Gray Lady”, formerly known as ‘The Paper of Record”, is shrinking. First in July of 2006 they announced a host of cost saving strategies, including mass layoffs, reducing the number of news pages, shutting a state of the art printing press facility, increasing newstand price, and reducing the size of the paper from 13.5 inches to the “industry standard” 12 inches.

Today began the new NYT 12 inch format. It is telling that the paper that all others aspired to be is resorting to follow “industry standard”; the NYT was the standard the industry tried to match. This reduced size paper is being rolled out a year ahead of schedule but the estimated cost savings have dropped from $30 million to $10 million a year. The cost of newsprint hasn’t dropped; in fact it has gone up so the savings should increase… unless of course the circulation has dropped in which case the projected savings indicate that reduction in circulation.

The New York Times has even resorted to a practice it once derided, giving deep discounts to subscribers in order to boost circulation costs. The Old Gray Lady was once above such obviously desperate tactics to generate ad revenues.

The NYT claims ad revenues are streaming out of the print papers and finding its way to “new media” sources. They are of course full of crap, their cross-town quasi-tabloid cousins, the NY News and the NY Post, are raking in cash. Across the Hudson River The Star-Ledger is setting the standard for paper circulation and profitability. There is money in print journalism and newspapers; the argument that it is disappearing is just plain wrong.

The reason for the NYT ignominious downfall is their editorial slant, which has bled over from the editorial page to affect the news content of their paper. Over the last decade or so the paper has allowed their left-of-socialism editorial stance affect the quality of their reporting. Once the paper’s bias was too blatant to ignore they started to hemorrhage customers and revenue. It used to be de rigueur for businessmen to be seen carrying their New York Times under their arms on, and under, the streets of The Big Apple. It was posited that a large percentage of the NYT was for posturing purposes and were never opened.

But rather than learn the key lesson from the failure of Air America, the NYT has actually picked up the pace on it’s leftist views, rebuking the proof that ultra left media is not a profitable venture. The ultra left accounts for a mere 5% of the population and it does not carry over well to moderates who are squeamish about extremism. Nor does it attract advertisers, which are the lifeblood of any media venture.

Unfortunately the publishers of the New York Times allowed their leftists beliefs to bias their reporting of the news. And it is impossible to be a virgin again, the NYT, or more likely the next owner of the NYT, will have a hard uphill battle to regain the credibility that the “Paper of Record” once had. Until then it is just another leftist tabloid, like the Village Voice, just not as entertaining.