Keller Says No Further Job Cuts at the Times (NYO)

I posted recently on the perils of cost cutting by a thousand cuts and how bad for staff morale it is. I also posted on Goldman Sach's analyst quite rightly connecting the dots between editorial cut backs and declining circulation.

So it's good to read the following about Mr. Keller on job cuts. However, I am perturbed by his use of the word 'horizon'.

Where exactly is the 'horizon' in the current newspaper industry/wider financial crisis?

Not very far away I would say and hearing about job cuts from him before Gawker is the same as saying you'll hear it from Mr. Keller 5 mins before Gawker or this blog.

None of which would make me put too much weight into his statement, honest and sincere as it no doubt it is, but things are moving fast.

P.S I don't know which is worse as a moniker: 'State of the Newsroom' (pompous) or 'Throw stuff at Bill' (dress down Friday corporate B.S for serious meetings)

Keller Says No Further Job Cuts at the Times (NYO)

by John Koblin October 27, 2008

"Throw Stuff at Bill" Keller
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller denied that there will be any further newsroom job cuts at the Times this morning at his State of the Newsroom meeting, "Throw Stuff at Bill." [Update, October 28th: The Times sessions are actually called "Throw Stuff at Bill."]
"The answer is no," said Mr. Keller, according to an attendee. "No, I do not see another round of newsroom staff reductions on the horizon."
He said that hiring will be "even more selective than before," but the goal is to avoid painful cuts that other newspapers have made.
Earlier this year, the Times cut 100 newsroom positions, leaving the total newsroom body count around 1200—bigger than any other single newspaper's newsroom in the country. At Mr. Keller's last newsroom address, back in February, he announced those job cuts, leaving many staffers wondering if more cuts would be announced again today.
Gawker had recently reported a tip that the newsroom was planning on a 20 percent editorial staff reduction.
Mr. Keller dismissed that rumor by saying, "consider the source." He said that if cuts become necessary, "You will hear it from me before you hear it on Gawker."
According to our source, the sole question that Mr. Keller was asked today was about job cuts and "he answered it, several times."
UPDATE 12:28 pm: Our source clarified that Mr. Keller wasn't asked one question; he was asked several.

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More on AP, newsroom cuts and outsourcing

Is the current economic crisis a game-changer for the media landscape? (I thought I'd just try and throw in that much over used media term to see how it reads: ghastly. I think I might start playing 'game-changer' bingo.)

With some newspapers struggling to meet their commercial paper obligations, certainly in 2009, and certainly when 2009 ad forecasts are revealed, some may go under. To prevent this, all issues are on the table, including the heavy usage of wire services such as AP.

I've blogged extensively on wires, and personally have my own thoughts as to what their future is and how in-house resources could and should be better allocated.

Here's more on the AP story. (Previous posts from E&P, then typically MSM behind the story, in a NYT piece that managed to catch up, but not even mention E.W. Scripps!), then more from E&P today.

Are we reaching a tipping point on the viability of many American newspapers, the viability of AP being the symptomatic tip of exactly that point but not the point itself (if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors)?

The more worrying picture for all these newspapers who attempt to devalue paid content from AP is that they devalue their own paid content in so doing. Why should consumer readers pay for content if newspapers won't. Equally, if the AP won't hold the line, or starts a panicky pricing slash in a short-term recession, they may live to regret it, if they live that is.

I'll come back to price cutting in a recession in a minute, but broadly speaking, in media, once you cut prices, it's a long slog to get those revenue figures back-up.

Time for steady hands and steadier nerves.

Will Scripps Follow Tribune In Dropping AP?

By Joe Strupp

Published: October 20, 2008 12:50 PM ET
NEW YORK Just days after Tribune Co. revealed it had given its two-year notice to possibly drop the Associated Press following a recent new rate structure, another major newspaper chain indicated it is considering the same move and is negotiating with AP over rates.

E.W. Scripps, which owns 17 daily papers including the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., declined to say if it already had or had not given notice to AP.

But in an e-mail to E&P, Tim King, Scripps vice president for corporate communications and investor relations, stated: "At this point, all I'd be comfortable saying is that we are a member in good standing of the AP, but we have been engaged in discussions concerning pricing so the future is uncertain."

Rocky Mountain News Editor and Publisher John Temple declined to comment on the situation when asked if notice had been given or if the chain would drop its AP membership. But he said he did believe his paper could operate without AP content.“I think we are very close to being able to do so,” Temple told E&P. “I think there are different papers that could put out a paper without AP in different ways. I believe you can do it and satisfy the needs of your readers.”

AP Spokesman Paul Colford declined to comment on Scripps' situation. The news cooperative just recently received the required two-year notice from Tribune, which owns nine daily papers, that could result in that chain dropping AP in 2010.

Several editors at a handful of Scripps papers declined to talk about the AP on the record, although several said changes could be in the offing. Don Kausler, editor of the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail, said he did not know exactly when or if notice had been given, but said papers are ready to do without AP if needed.“It’s much like what Tribune is doing, leaving options open,” Kausler said. “When AP requires two-year’s notice, we see no harm in exercising that option. That doesn’t mean that in two years we won’t be running AP stories, but by giving notice, that can happen.”

Kausler said for a small paper like his, which often runs no more than one page a day of national and international news, AP can be expensive.

“Sports is probably the area where papers are more dependent on it,” he adds. “But in the next two years, you will see more alternatives.”

Shane Fitzgerald, editor and vice president of Scripps' Corpus Christi (Tex.) Caller-Times, agrees: "We will just wait and see what happens. We have other wire services, too. We use AP and others."The recent decisions to drop AP service follow the planned AP rate structure change, which was announced in 2007 and takes effect in 2009. The rate change initially prompted complaints from numerous newspapers, including two groups of editors who wrote angry letters to AP to complain in late 2007 and early 2008.Under current AP policy, each newspaper buys a package of general news created by AP based on that paper's location and circulation. The package usually includes breaking news, sports, business, and other national, international, and regional news relevant to the client's market, including its state AP wire. ((Under the new structure, AP member newspapers will receive all breaking news worldwide (including items from other state wires), as well as breaking sports, business, and entertainment stories. In addition, a package of premium content — made up of five types of non-breaking stories including sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and analysis — will be available at an additional cost. ((When the new structure was announced in 2007, AP promised a combined savings of $5.6 million across newspaper member budgets, which increased to $14 million —and, finally, $21 million just days before the April annual AP meeting. AP also recently instituted a hiring freeze.

In recent months, other papers have given the required two-year's notice to drop AP. Those include: The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Bakersfield Californian, The Post Register of Idaho Falls, and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both of Washington.

The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., is trying to cut ties without a two-year notice, planning to discontinue AP content at the end of 2008. At least one newspaper, The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., tested the approach by publishing an entire newspaper for one day last month without AP content. So far, that paper has not given notice to cut the service.

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

Meanwhile, over at AP, in the middle of consumer rebellion, the Chairman of the Board of AP thinks it's a good idea to announce that he personally thinks it's a good idea to outsource editorial offerings. Sex on the beach in the UAE, here we go. The AP CEO must be thrilled at his Chairman's fantastic sense of timing.

Personally, until I know a lot more about what's on offer in Bangalore et al., I'm with Bernard Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA. "It may in the short run save costs. In the long run, what does it do to the quality of the product?"

Production and other back office outsourcing to Bangalore is one thing, editorial content, quite another.

APMediaNews CEO: Outsourcing could help save money

Monday October 20, 7:24 pm ET By Matt Sedensky, Associated Press Writer
MediaNews CEO says consolidation, outsourcing could help newspapers survive
AVENTURA, Fla. (AP) -- Consolidating and outsourcing news operations -- even overseas -- could help newspapers survive as their revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday.
MediaNews Group Inc. CEO Dean Singleton, who also serves as chairman of the board of The Associated Press, told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was exploring outsourcing in nearly every aspect of their operations.
"In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter," Singleton said after his speech.
MediaNews publishes The Denver Post, The Detroit News and 52 other daily newspapers and is well known for cost-cutting efforts, including combining many operations of its papers near San Francisco.
Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.
"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.
Other publishers also have consolidated newsroom functions this year. Two Florida papers owned by The New York Times Co. said in August they were merging news and copy desk functions, design, layout and pagination. The McClatchy Co. papers in Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., are sharing sports and political reporting staff.
But few have sent newsroom functions overseas, limiting off-shoring mostly to ad production and other non-editorial functions, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc.
Notable exceptions are Thomson Reuters, which has been using journalists in Bangalore, India, to handle some basic news such as corporate earnings reports, and a Web site called pasadenanow.com, which has five regular contributors overseas who write about Pasadena, Calif., using webcasts of council meetings and information provided by citizen volunteers.
"We used to have on-the-ground reporters, but the expense was prohibitive," said James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the site. "Regretfully, we had to lay them all off."
Macpherson said he saw no reason a larger publication couldn't adopt similar techniques to save costs.
"You might miss the nuance of a sneer on a councilman's face but you know how he voted and what he said," he said. "That's factual and can be reported on from anywhere."
In a statement, Thomson Reuters spokesman Joe Christinat said that "by reporting some of the more commoditized news from Bangalore, our reporters are freed up to add greater value to the file with more insight, analysis, interviews, exclusives and market-moving, in-depth stories."
Despite this year's dismal drumbeat of layoffs and revenue drops, Singleton said newspapers still have incredible reach in the country, calling them cornerstones of democracy. But he said they must change in order to survive.
"Fond memories of dead newspapers will do nothing for our communities," he said.
Singleton praised electronic versions of newspapers because they eliminate printing and delivery expenses. He also said newspapers could heal their bottom lines by building up their ad sales forces and producing more niche publications like wedding magazines to attract more advertising.
Singleton said no decision has been made to outsource editorial functions overseas at any MediaNews publications, though it was recommended by consultants. He said publishers were trying to consolidate editing and design domestically, whether in one place or several, and see if they could match the savings they would see by going overseas.
Editors and reporters have intensely questioned newsroom outsourcing. Long-distance editors might miss locally relevant nuances or fail to fill in context based on a knowledge of the region, said Bernard Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA.
"It may in the short run save costs. In the long run, what does it do to the quality of the product?" he said.
But Singleton said Monday that local editors would always maintain final control and that no page would go to press without their approval.
Singleton talked about outsourcing delivery of newspapers, relying more intensely on syndicates for non-local news, and moving circulation call centers offshore.
He mentioned outsourcing printing to competitors and centralizing ad production and said that may be as cheap as going overseas. But he said most of the preproduction work for MediaNews' papers in California is being done in India, a move he said cut costs by 65 percent.
"If you need to offshore it, offshore it," he said.
AP Business Writer Anick Jesdanun contributed to this report from New York.

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Some papers in financial trouble are leaving the AP to cut costs (IHT)

I blogged on this too yesterday:

Some papers in financial trouble are leaving the AP to cut costs
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, October 20, 2008
For most of its 137-year history, The Columbus Dispatch has carried articles and images from The Associated Press. Like most big American newspapers, it supplements the work of its own staff with dozens of items daily from The AP.
That may end soon.
Unhappy with both the AP service and its price — more than $800,000 a year at a time when The Dispatch's finances are severely pinched — the paper on Friday took the once-unthinkable step of saying it would drop the service.
What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against The AP suddenly grew much more serious last week, when the Tribune Company, one of the largest newspaper chains, said on Thursday that it would drop out of the association, followed by The Dispatch's announcement. A handful of papers have made the same move over the last few months, but with the exception of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, they were relatively small.
Tribune, in disclosing the plan to sever its ties with The AP, voiced no complaints about the service, saying only that it needed to cut costs. The move raised the prospect of major Tribune papers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune publishing without the aid of a wire service that has been an essential part of American journalism since the cooperative was established more than a century and a half ago.
But editors and publishers at some other papers have become vocal critics of the way The AP operates, saying that it charges more than they can afford, delivers too little of what they need and — particularly galling to them — is sometimes acting as their competitor on the Internet.
"They seem to have forgotten that they are there to serve us," said Benjamin Marrison, editor of The Dispatch.
That anger spilled into public view in April at a meeting in Washington when the president and chief executive of The AP, Tom Curley, discussed his plans to cut prices and add new services — and then watched as editor after editor stood to scold him.
The AP says it is trying to save money for its more than 1,400 member newspapers, and all the changes under way will benefit them. Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of The AP, said the protests came from a small number of papers and stem from "some element of misunderstanding about what AP is trying to do" and frustration over the papers' finances.
"I don't think any of us can ignore the economic circumstances newspapers are in now," Carroll said. "Being the editor of a newspaper in the United States right now is really hard."
Contractually, newspapers must give two years' notice to drop the service, so those that recently opted out have until 2010 to change their minds. AP executives say they suspect that some papers are using that notice as leverage to bargain for lower rates.
In addition to the papers that said they would leave the wire, others are considering it, and still others have set up regional cooperatives meant to supplant part of their relationship with The AP — a trial run for life after the wire service.
Newspapers are going through their most wrenching time since the Depression, with advertising revenue falling about 25 percent over the last two years. But the balance sheet of The AP, a nonprofit company, is healthy; last year its profit rose 81 percent, to $24 million, on revenue of $710 million, according to a financial statement issued to its members.
It remains to be seen whether defections become a major problem for The AP, the world's largest news-gathering organization with more than 3,000 journalists in about 100 countries. Without the rich diet of articles, photographs, audio and video it feeds its clients, most American newspapers would be much slimmer and their coverage less expansive.
Newspapers banded together 162 years ago to create The Associated Press. Only daily papers in the United States can be members, giving them ownership and a vote in elections for the board. The company has more than 5,000 other domestic clients — broadcasters, Web sites, weekly papers and magazines — and roughly 8,500 abroad.
In addition to the news that AP reporters produce, the wire also takes breaking news articles from its members and distributes them to other clients.
For many members, The AP is one of their biggest expenses.
"We pay in excess of $1 million a year to The AP, which is equal to 10 to 12 reporters in the newsroom," said Nancy Barnes, editor of The Star Tribune.
Several editors interviewed for this article said they could find other sources for written material — wire services like Reuters or Bloomberg News, or the news services sold by major newspaper companies. But other AP products, especially photography, would be harder to replace, they said.
"We thought, 'We have two years to try and figure this out,' " Barnes said. Her paper is one of the industry's most troubled; it recently stopped making payments on its debt.
This summer, dissatisfied with the way The AP handles local news, eight papers in Ohio formed a cooperative to share articles, and some of those papers say they might drop the wire service. Newspapers in Pennsylvania are exploring a similar arrangement.
"We're facing terrible economic challenges, so naturally we're looking at one of our biggest costs," said David Shribman, executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The editors in Ohio, in particular, say The AP has retreated from one of its traditional roles: producing a lot of routine, breaking-news articles.
The AP wants to make its work more engaging, with more enterprise journalism like features, investigations and analyses — but that is also the direction many papers are going.
Marrison of The Columbus Dispatch said that course had forced newspapers to devote more resources to small stories that used to be covered by The AP "Then The AP rewrites our story and sends it out," he said. "So we're sacrificing our enterprise so that AP can do its enterprise? No, no, no. We're the owners."
Carroll of The AP said it had only "trimmed back on things that weren't getting much use."
"We're not trying to absolve ourselves from nuts-and-bolts news, but we cannot survive if we are spending our day doing the mark-up of some legislative measure that is of interest to one part of the state but not another," she said.
The AP does not release details about what clients pay, but newspapers' fees vary based on their circulation and the services they receive. For the last three years, the company has held those fees flat. The AP says the fees are partly subsidized by the higher prices it charges to nonmember clients, which account for about three-quarters of its revenue.
The AP says that a new price structure, set to go into effect in January, will give papers a 10 percent price cut on average. But even that plan caused complaints, leading to multiple revisions since it was first announced last year.
Papers object to a requirement that they allow The AP to apply its electronic tags to the articles they publish in order for the papers to qualify for the discounted fees.
The tags are bits of computer code, invisible to readers, that are intended to make Web pages rank high in Internet searches. While The AP says that most member papers have signed up for the tagging program, the largest newspapers, including The New York Times, have developed their own tagging systems and so far have not switched to The AP's.
The AP recently introduced an ad-supported mobile Internet service, fed by its own work and that of newspapers in the tagging program. To some newspaper executives, the mobile service looks like a bid by The AP to make money from their work — and to compete with the papers' own mobile services.
"If you want our content, you should have to come to us for it," said Barnes of The Star Tribune.
Similarly, some editors and publishers dislike The AP's practice of selling a news service to aggregators like Google and Yahoo; they want their own articles on those sites instead.
Jim Kennedy, an AP vice president and its director for strategic planning, said that papers should not see The AP as a competitor. He said the mobile network would share ad revenue with participating papers — many of which do not have the resources to develop such services — and drive Internet traffic to those papers.
"We're trying to be the portal, linking back to the contributors," he said. "We know there are members who would rather we didn't license our content to Google," he said, "but the money The AP gets from that helps defray the costs that members don't pay."

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Friction between edit and the B-Side at NYT?

I recently posted on the decision to cut back the stand alone sports and metro sections at the NYT.

To which I received this anonymous comment, which I think we can assume comes from a B-side employee of the NYT/IHT.

Am I sensing some friction here or is it just me?

"Don't give them their own section? And all to save a mere $5 - $6 million dollars
(these figures are always produced by the business side and should be automatically reduced by 25-50% depending on who told them to you)."

To this poster above - It seems the business side employees have taken the greatest share of the hits and cuts though buyouts and closed B-units, out-sourced to India and sparing you unpleasantness you could never bear. Maybe the creative (Ha) side need just a little bit more angst to be more successful - maybe cut 200 more writers so that the remaining ones are more productive? Outsource editing to Mumbai writers - they do superb work for the B-side you know. After Jason was found to call in stories from Iraq from W44 St, saloon, the public voted by passing up at the newsstand in the AM.

Just for the record, the 'you' referred to above is 'me' and I think that I am presumed to be an editorial employee of the NYT/IHT, which I am not. Nor am I B-side. I'm a reader.

But I do agree with 'you' about Jason and very possibly cutting some more writers/outsourcing copy-editing.

I think there is A LOT to be said for outsourcing the IHT's Paris copy-editing, but they need more writers, more journalists. The IHT editorial ship, from the perspective of the numbers of people actually out there generating stories for IHT readers that the NYT isn't delivering, is slim. With Asian and multiple editions the senior writers are working pretty hard, at least that's my reading of it, and they probably don't need any more angst. As for NY, I can't say.

As for IHT Paris copy-editors who have been in place since before Gordon B was born, that's another matter. Mumbai away.

However that won't save the NYT/IHT either.

Neither the edit side nor the B-Side have as yet worked out that for the long haul they're both currently engaged in producing and marketing Newspaper 1.0 when what is needed is Newspaper 2.0.

I think blame for this can probably be assigned more or less equally, leaning slightly towards the 'creative' side who are stuck in a journalistic rut that is not of our age.

P.S Did Jason really call in stories from Iraq!!?? I knew I should have read that self-flagellating report more carefully. Here was I thinking that the reason people started passing on the NYT at the newsstand was because Judy was calling in stories from the Veep's office.



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Nice Job Lads - now get outta the way! : Cost-cutting at the New York Times (NYO)

What do you do with two award winning sections - in this case Sports and Metro.

Don't give them their own section? Exactly.

And all to save a mere $5 - $6 million dollars (these figures are always produced by the business side and should be automatically reduced by 25-50% depending on who told them to you). And if a focus group says its O.K, well fire away. Hell, have 'em come in and run the paper.

It's this type of non-consequential, distracting cost-cutting that in the long run cracks morale, won't add up to a bag of beans nor save any newspaper that hasn't migrated to Newspaper 2.0, which is why I got out of the newspaper business.

I'm not quite sure who this is supposed to impress other than petulant hedge fund investors, but 'it don't impress me'.

For Times 'Gold Medalists,' A Place in the Back Pages
by John Koblin September 9, 2008

On Sept. 10 at 5:30 p.m., The Times will round up the newsroom on the third floor at its Eighth Avenue building to toast the accomplishments of the 32 reporters and editors who covered the Olympics—the majority of them from the sports department. There will be Champagne and egg rolls to reward the “stunning” coverage The Times produced on the Web, and in the newspaper, wrote executive editor Bill Keller in a staff memo. In an earlier staff e-mail, he lauded the staff and subjected the note, “Our Gold Medalists.”
But in these difficult times, journalistic success is not a protection against the inevitable downscaling affecting the newspaper industry. Just five days earlier, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. informed the staff that starting in October, for four days a week, the sports section would lose its stand-alone section, and would be tucked inside the business section
Similarly, the Metro Section, for six days a week, will be inserted into the A-section, behind the International and National reports.
“The aim, of course, is to save money—and, importantly, to do it without cutting back coverage,” wrote Mr. Keller in a follow-up memo to the announcement by Mr. Sulzberger.
The Metro Section, too, has had a good year—journalistically speaking. In March, Metro editor Joe Sexton’s staff scored the scoop of a lifetime when it broke the story that Eliot Spitzer was caught up in prostitution ring scandal; Spitzer announced his resignation two days after the story broke online.
But since, Metro has been the biggest victim of this very rough year: It lost bodies amid the larger 100 job cuts the paper enacted through buyouts and layoffs; the department was forced to virtually shut down its suburban bureaus in New Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island; and every day other than Sunday, it will now be buried behind the International and National reports.
Coincidence or not, Metro and sports are two sections that have been complimented, time and time again, for their Web coverage; the Metro report for its City Room coverage, and sports, most recently, for its Rings blog during the Olympics.
Multiple sources described Mr. Keller and his masthead colleagues resisting the proposal, which originated in the business side of the paper. But these are tough times—and the elimination of these two section fronts stands to save the newspaper a “significant” amount, according to a source who said that Mr. Sulzberger put the savings at $4 million to $5 million a year.
Like many newspapers, these sorts of display and printing changes allow editors to save the overall amount of space reserved for these stories—and to avoid firing any “Gold Medalists.”
Sources with knowledge of the unfolding situation said sometime in the last month, editors left The Times building on Eighth Avenue and watched through one-way glass as the proposal was put before a focus group of regular readers.
“There was concern about how our readers would react,” said a newsroom source. “There was concern whether we were taking something important away from them. It turned out in the reader interviews that it wasn’t a huge deal for them. They kept saying, ‘But will it be the same content?’”
It will, Mr. Keller has since assured the staff. Or at least, they do “not expect” to lose page numbers, content, or more reporters.
But the industry downturn doesn’t show much sign of letting up, does it?
Other solutions had been proposed, according to sources, including one in which the Metro and sports sections were combined into a single section. (Sort of like a mini-New York Post flopping out of the Times?) But that proposal was not seriously considered for very long.
Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail to staff that they would strongly consider each section for better A1 placement. A source said that both editors pushed for full-color pages when they’re within other sections, but that there was no guarantee that would happen; according to a newsroom source, neither Metro editor Joe Sexton nor sports editor Tom Jolly was “thrilled with the decision, but they understood.”
“I feel bad for not feeling worse about it,” said Mr. Jolly, the paper’s sports editor, to Off the Record. “We would love to have a section front seven days a week, and we would love to have more space. We are also realistic. We’re confident we can maintain the quality work we’ve been producing in print. All things considered, it could be a lot worse.”
And the way things are looking these days, it still could be.
jkoblin@observer.com
http://www.observer.com:80/2008/media/times-gold-medalists-place-back-pages




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Sulzberger's memo to New York Times staff.

Question: when something big happens at the New York Times, and Keller and others send out memos, do they go to their employees at their global edition HQ in Paris and elsewhere?

I don't know - if you work for the IHT and don't get these memos, do let me know. Normal rules of confidentiality apply.

In case you missed it, here is Sulzberger's memo to NYT staff further to announcements late last Friday to combine its Metro and Sports sections into section A and Business Day, respectively, in Metropolitan editions, from the 6th October, 2008. The move is an attempt to save money by increasing the number of single print runs at the Queens printing facility.

To the Staff:

Given the business challenges we face, we are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs that do not affect the quality or quantity of the journalism we provide to our readers. Next month you will see one such way in the metropolitan edition of The Times.
Beginning Monday, Oct. 6, we will introduce a new layout of the paper by consolidating some sections. Metro will be integrated into the Main News section Monday through Saturday. Business and Sports will be combined into one section Tuesday through Friday. There will be no loss of content for readers. In fact, there will be some advantages -- a freestanding Saturday Arts section and a return to later deadlines for Business news on Monday -- and we are working to create later deadlines for culture coverage. The cost savings, which are significant, will come from the production savings of having a single run on more nights than we do today.
We are not reducing the space devoted to Metro or Sports news. This is simply a way to produce the paper more efficiently. These changes will affect the New York edition only, as the national edition is already configured in a similar fashion.
That said, we don’t make these changes lightly. We care deeply about what our New York readers think about their edition. We know that many of our readers like and are comfortable with our current layout. But after a good amount of reader research and exploring various options, we feel this is an effective way to reduce expenses while providing our readers with the breadth and depth of high-quality coverage they expect from us and we are committed to giving them.
Arthur

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