Hoaxes and Non-existence: When is Richard Pérez-Peña going to start writing about the future of the NYT Company?

Richard Pérez-Peña, the New York Times senior media writer, does a stand up job of covering the American media scene, most recently A senior fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence By Richard Pérez-Peña and coverage of the hoax NYT edition (covered by this blog before the NYT).

The IHT is happy to run corporate press releases concerning good news stories - appointments of new editors, opening of print sites, publishing partnerships etc.

But there seems to be a resounding silence from the NYT and the IHT's media writers about the future of their employee.

Normally, I am against in-house media writers covering their own paper, and don't like the above mentioned examples of corporate puff pieces - there is a credibility problem.

But if the senior editors will run these puff pieces, isn't it time for some serious reporting about the rather dire straights of the NYT Company. It is, presumably, a two way street, and of some interest to IHT readers (at least judged by emails and traffic to this blog).

Time, I think, with NYT time stock trading below $8 and the blogosphere awash with NYT stories, for either Pfanner or Doreen C. to be tasked this story, because it sure ain't coming from Richard.

They even managed to run a piece about how companies were turning to blogging to report layoffs (especially in media sector) to be ahead of the blogosphere. Perhaps someone might re-read that story and see whether they can see any relevance in it to the NYT itself.

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LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended." The Oxford Times

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'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times



For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees

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Things aren't looking too good are they? Are we in fact on the brink?

I just completed my own narrative of Friday, 31st October 2008 and there are things that worry me a great deal more than the future of newspapers.

But on the media side, things aren't looking too good are they?

An ex-executive editor of the International Herald Tribune told me this week that he had something called a BQ (for blog quotient) and that it was pretty full. He reads HuffPost, RealClearPolitics, the Daily Beast, and one private one.

I noted he didn't read Porfolio, if we can call it a blog, which I suppose we can if we can call HuffPost one; below is some info on the dodgy future of Portfolio.

What interested me most is that the blogs this ex-IHT boss mentioned aren't really blogs (like this one) but simply non-MSM on the Internet. He might not be reading a lot (and I don't know what his MSM quotient is) but he's reading it. A MSM guy to the core and he's not in his 20s.

If we take the advertising forecasts for '09, let alone '10 which no one is daring to even speak of I note, and we add in these sea change reading habits, I just can't see how the NYT/IHT are going to get by without some really smart thinking and some pretty smart thinking right now.

In today's IHT, the op-ed page, for the first time used the term 'Afghanistan on the Brink'.

Well, if you've been reading your IHT carefully this year, it's a wonder to you probably why it's taken until the beginning of November for such op-ed pieces to appear under such a headline.

I feel much the same way about the NYT/IHT strategy. We are at an 'on the brink' moment for the future of two newspapers that I and many readers of this blog love.

What I don't see is an acknowledgement of that. But I'm well on the outside, so don't give that idea too much weight. Who knows what their smart Ivys and MBAers in R&D and Strat Plan have up their sleeves?

However, sitting there in their huge (and massively expensive and bottom-line useless/mistake) H.Q building in Manhattan, with a million circulation, being the number one newspaper site and just immersed in the incredible self-belief of American, sorry, NYT, exceptionalism, it's not difficult to see how that headline might not appear in your head: "NYT on the brink".

But I'm pretty sure that's exactly where it is.

Ironically, NYT Company stock, having dipped below the '$10-for-me-on-the-brink-price', ended the month exactly, to the cent, there: it closed out Friday at $10. A 22% drop in the last three months.

New York Times Co
(NYT:NYQ) NYT on other Exchanges
10.00 USD Last
+0.07 +0.70% Change
Data as of October 31, 2008 16:03 exchange time.

I'm going to take a break from Think! next week, elections being one reason, my wife being in Australia and me looking after my two boys being another.

I'll be back. I think.

Condé Nast cuts profile of 2 magazines
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Friday, October 31, 2008
Condé Nast Publications will make deep staff cuts at two magazines, Portfolio and Men's Vogue, and publish them less often while cutting budgets across the company by 5 percent, company executives said Thursday.
Men's Vogue will all but disappear as a separate operation. It will be folded into Vogue and will be published twice a year instead of 10 times, the company said. Employees said they were told Thursday that most of the magazine's staff would be laid off.
The business magazine Portfolio will be published 10 times a year instead of 12. Employees said they were told Thursday that most of Portfolio's Web site staff would be dismissed and that much of the content unique to the site would be dropped.
The company's official position was that it had not yet determined where it would cut Portfolio, or how deeply, but executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to go into detail said they expected that 15 to 20 percent of the magazine's jobs would be eliminated. Some of the cuts will involve Portfolio's online operations, including advertising sales, which will be folded into those of Wired magazine.
The cuts at Condé Nast demonstrate that the belt-tightening at American magazines has reached even those that rely on luxury product advertising — a segment of the industry that has held up better than most.
"We still like the magazines," said David Carey, a group president at Condé Nast who directs several magazines, including Portfolio. "What we don't like is the revenue trend across all sectors of the business."
Through the first nine months of the year, ad pages in all U.S. magazines were down 9.5 percent from the same period in 2007. Most magazines produced by Condé Nast — including Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest and Wired — have had much smaller declines, but they are also among the most expensive magazines to produce.
Portfolio, started last year amid much fanfare, is Condé Nast's first business magazine and its most expensive new project in years. Executives said the company was willing to lose more than $100 million on it.
It had an average circulation of 415,000 in the first half of the year and 445 ad pages through nine months — good figures for a new magazine but still far short of profitability. It hired a staff of prominent editors and reporters at high salaries but has been roiled by internal disputes and high turnover. Men's Vogue, started in 2006, has circulation of almost 370,000 and 449 ad pages through nine months.
Condé Nast executives said spending had been under budget, with several positions unfilled, which would limit the effect of the 5 percent budget cut.
Aside from Men's Vogue and Portfolio, they said, staff cuts would mostly be achieved by attrition, though they said there would be some layoffs.

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
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LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended." The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk


Amazon.com

For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.
10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees



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Suzy Menkes ought to stick to clothes

A ghastly page by Suzy Menkes in the IHT last Tuesday, with a number of fawning, poorly written celeb-based pieces ranging from 'cool artists' to some Greek princess and her extremely expensive clothes for children in Sloane Street.

I am a huge admirer of Suzy, but when she operates out of area (to use NATO parlance) it gets very messy.

Witness this from her, a piece in its conclusion completely at odds with two pieces by the IHT's and the NYT's art writers.

Frieze power: Art shakes up London society
By Suzy Menkes
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: Where would you find a congregation of celebrities from Lily Allen through Kate Bosworth to Emma Watson? And fashion folk like Roland Mouret, Raf Simons or the milliner Philip Treacy? Not to mention cool artists like Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry, wearing a necklace of his alter-ego, Claire, dressed as Bo-Peep.
The latter names are the clue: It was last week's Frieze contemporary art fair in London that drew an international crowd and spawned a host of related events.
Such is the power of Frieze to pull in the hyper-hip and former super-rich that it has become a stronger magnet for the stylish than London Fashion Week.
Whether or not they were buying (count in the glam Moscow gallery owner Daria Zhukova, partner of the billionaire Roman Abramovich), Frieze has had an extraordinary impact on London society, making it the 21st-century version of the old guard's "Ascot" week and "the season."
Art folk did not just ricochet from Frieze to the spacious new Charles Saatchi gallery. They also went cool-hunting in the stores. Matthew Slotover, co-founder of the five-year-old fair in Regent's Park, said that Martin Margiela's London store was a must-see for all his arty visitors. Dover Street Market also says that it counts on Frieze for its best selling week of the year. Recession? The "R" word was replaced by the "F" word: Frieze.

At contemporary art sales, market stumbles on
By Souren Melikian
Monday, October 20, 2008
LONDON: The two-round match played out on the London auction scene this weekend left contemporary art badly bruised. Round One, fought at Sotheby's, revealed for the first time in years that all is not well in that field.
Sotheby's session on Friday night got off to a dashing start thanks to Oliver Barker, a "senior international specialist" and one of the most brilliant upcoming young auctioneers in London. Calling out bids at top speed, he managed to convey for a while the impression that raving buyers were scrambling on top of each other to put in bids.
Lot 1, "The Pink Tree" by John Currin, an oil on paper that could be a spoof of 16th century German painting, improbably doubled its estimate at £139,250, or $241,300. Next came Antony Gormley's "Domain LXIV," a construction of small stainless steel rods conjuring up the figure of a man standing. Like so much of contemporary art, it has a whiff of Dada, the art of the absurd invented a century ago by Marcel Duchamp as a slap in the face of the then-bourgeois establishment. Today's new establishment coughed up £193,250, well above the high estimate.
But an auctioneer's brio will take you just so far. By the time the third lot, Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Jaggy Snake Charity Painting" came up, enthusiasm was dying down. The 2007 Hirst, which resembles an enlarged close-up of traditional marbled paper painted in gaudy household gloss, sold with difficulty, under the low estimate, for £115,250.
That made the public uneasy. Howard Hodgkin's "Ekow," a kind of haphazard smear, dropped dead. Next, an abstract bronze and lacquer sculpture by Anish Kapoor also crashed. The failure of two works, both executed in 2008, did not augur well.
The sale became sticky. The first big lot, Andy Warhol's "skulls" of 1976, which reproduced 10 times in acrylic and silkscreen ink the image of a skull, very nearly failed and was retrieved by one £3.85 million bid, bringing the full price to £4.35 million, still far below the lowest expectations.
The second biggest lot, Gerhard Richter's "Abstract Picture (Red)," likewise sold by the skin of its teeth, for £2.84 million - one fifth less than the lowest price forecast by Sotheby's.
By the end of the sale, 27 percent of the works remained stranded. At the press conference held in a subdued atmosphere, a Sotheby's spokesperson revealed that the auction house had worked hard to persuade consignors to bring down their reserves. The house evidently succeeded to some extent - the six highest prices paid that evening were all well below the lower end of the estimate. All told, sales added up to £22 million. This was not a debacle, but undoubtedly a severe retreat.
As Christie's took over on Sunday afternoon in a leaden atmosphere, there were empty seats in the room.
In an eerie parallel to Sotheby's, the first three lots sold. Ron Arad's "London Parpadelle," a steel contraption which looked like a rug of steel mail unfolding and was No.6 in an edition of six, managed a generous £139,250. Takashi Murakami's composition "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," done in a futuristic comic strip style, then rose to £421,250, followed by Farhad Moshiri's "Golden Love Super Deluxe," a spoofy gilt wood cabinet filled with equally spoofy gilt porcelain and wooden pieces at £145,250.
At that point, the room lost interest. Andy Warhol's "Nine Multicolored Marilyns" dropped dead, and so did Jeff Koons's "Jim Beam-Log Car," a small stainless object produced in 1986 in an edition of three plus an artist proof. It matched its description but amused no one.
But Gilbert & George's set of 29 gelatin silver prints did. Titled "Muscadet," the set was "executed in 1973." Featured in many exhibitions, ranging from the Centre George Pompidou in Paris (1981) to the Hayward gallery in London (1987), it sold for £301,250.
Christie's, like Sotheby's, had persuaded some consignors to bring down their reserves, and that allowed the auctioneer to unload several heavyweights, all below the low reserve. A Lucio Fontana pulled through, on a single £8 million bid, missing the £10 million estimate quoted by Christie's "on request." But the oval piece of canvas, pierced with holes that give it the appearance of a moth-eaten doormat, was not cheap at £9 million, the price it cost with the sale charge.
Neither was the second most expensive painting, a realistic study of Bacon's face done more than 50 years ago by Lucian Freud. That realized £5.42 million, also less than the low estimate - but, again, a huge price.
By the auction's end, Christie's had sold 26 of 47 works for £32 million. The short message is that there is life left in the contemporary art market at 25 to 30 percent below current ambitions. That is very good in the current circumstances. Auction houses and their consigners had better heed the lesson.

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For the IHT, the most worrying bearish 2009 forecast I have seen

There has been no shortage of bearish 2009 advertising revenue forecasts. This one isn't new, but that it is carried by WWD touches upon one of the most important advertising categories for the International Herald Tribune - the fashion industry. To be read with alarm in some quarters I would think.

Question: Is Suzy Menkes Power recession proof? And what happens, if, when, she retires - where is the succession plan and what is it going to cost the IHT to make that hire?

S&P BEARISH ON PRINT ADS: Add Standard & Poor’s to the growing list of industry watchers down on print advertising, at least for now.
“High debt levels, migration of ad spending to the Internet, declining newsstand sales and mature industry growth prospects suggest a near-term decline in credit risk,” the ratings service said. S&P expects magazine ad pages to decline through the end of 2008, with “minimal benefit from election-year activity,” it said, adding, “The sector will face continued ad rate challenges, especially given pressure on circulation levels that publishers guarantee to advertisers.”
As for newspapers, S&P expects newspaper revenue and cash flow to continue to drop “at rates that accelerate each quarter.” “The pullback in advertising dollars has been so dramatic that publishers have struggled to adjust their cost structures,” the agency said. Five out of the nine rated newspaper companies are “CCC,” “signaling a near-term liquidity threat.”
The New York Times Co. was placed on CreditWatch in July after the company reported a drop in earnings before interest, taxes, appreciation and amortization of 36 percent for the second quarter, compared with the same period during the prior year.S&P expects the economic downturn will bottom out in early- to mid-2009 — although it doesn’t expect a pickup in activity until late 2009.
“As a result, we expect total ad spending to be minimally higher (0.9 percent) in 2009,” the report said. — Amy Wicks

http://www.wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/sp-bearish-on-print-ads-the-princess-diaries-cutbacks-cutting-even-deeper-1837410?navSection=media-news&toc_preselected=65#/article/media-news/fashion-memopad/sp-bearish-on-print-ads-the-princess-diaries-cutbacks-cutting-even-deeper-1837410?page=2

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NYT and LinkedIn and IHT People LinkedIn

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally cracked and signed up under the user name ihtreaders.blogspot.com with LinkedIn, which is a business networking site that works in partnership with the http://www.nytimes.com/ - need to check out exactly what the relationship is and if it extends beyond paid for click-throughs, in which case I have earned the NYT about 1 cent. (No, I'm sure it's more.)

Interesting, good site, good navigation, real practical applications, and no I won't be subcribing to the upgrade service to be able to contact the very many people I know who are on this site.

I even set up a LinkedIn Group called International Herald Tribune Employees, Past and Present which thus far has a membership of ONE. (Me.)

I searched a few past and present IHT names, and found people working for Nokia, other media groups and inter alia (I'll probably get busted for this and LinkedOut but no matter):

Didier Brun
International Director, Meetic
Location
Paris Area, France
Industry
Internet
Current
International Director at MEETIC
Past
Senior Vice President at International Herald Tribune
Senior Vice President at International Herald Tribune, New York Times
Education
INSEAD
Stanford University
New York University
Connections
70 connections

CEMEA Subscription Agents Manager at Financial Times
Past
Advertising Manager at The International Herald Tribune
International Client Supervisor at Le Cordon Bleu
Education
Purdue University & Schiller International University
Recommendations
1 person has recommended this user
Connections
48 connections

Dibble Law Offices
Location
Columbia, South Carolina Area
Industry
Law Practice
Current
Senior Lawyer at Dibble Law Offices
Past
Partner at Cooper, Beard & Dibble
Partner at Cooper, Bowen, Beard & Smoot
Associate at West, Bendorf, Cooper & Bowen
3 more...
Education
University of South Carolina School of Law
Université de Paris à la Sorbonne
Davidson College

After working as a newspaperman with the International Herald Tribune and Agence France-Presse in Paris and with Kayhan International in Tehran in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he returned to South Carolina and obtained his J.D. degree from the School of Law at the University of South Carolina in 1977

Circulation Director, National Review
Location
Greater New York City Area
Industry
Marketing and Advertising
Current
Circulation Director at National Review
Past
Founder and business development director at EZ Marketing and Consulting, Inc.
Sales Expansion Team Manager at The New York Times Co.
Operations Director, The Americas at The International Herald Tribune
2 more...
Education
Saint John's University - Peter J. Tobin College of Business
Recommendations
2 people have recommended this user
Connections
78 connections

Nokia, Director CRM (Andrew, this must be you - the man who dragged me into the IHT back in 1994 in Amsterdam).
Location
Finland
Industry
Telecommunications
Current
Director CRM at Nokia
Past
Head of Portfolio Management at Nokia
Director, Mobile Marketing at Starcut
Management Consultant at Bob Helsinki
5 more...
Education
Helsinki School of Economics
School of Oriental and African Studies, U. of London
West Buckland School
Recommendations
3 people have recommended this user
Connections
113 connections

International Sales Director
Location
London, United Kingdom
Industry
Publishing
Current
International Sales Director at EuroNews
Past
Managing Director - Global Sales at The New York Times Media Company
New York Ad Agency Director at International Herald Tribune
International Account Manager at Initiative Media
2 more...
Education
The Open University
Liverpool Hope University
Gravesend Grammer School fo Boys
Connections
148 connections

I found there were 93 IHT employees on LinkedIn, about half women, half men and with a median age of 35 years, 49 of them in Paris, and 6 in London.

Quite interesting were the numbers of them interested in career opportunities.

International Herald Tribune Employees on LinkedIn
93 total
Media Marketing Manager
London, United Kingdom
Project Manager
Paris Area, France
South Asia Correspondent
India
Senior Editor & General Manager, Newsroom
Paris Area, France
Director of Design & User Experience
Paris Area, France
See more International Herald Tribune employees »

New HiresWhat’s this?
Ciara O'Rourke, Editorial Newsroom Intern
was Editor in Chief at Klipsun Magazine - last month
Alan Flippen, Editor, Newsroom Organization
was Senior Editor, Planning at The New York Times - 2 months ago
Lucy Conticello, Photo Researcher/Editor -Freelance
was Photo Editor -Freelance at Courrier International - 2 months ago
Liz Webber, Web Intern
was Web Intern at Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel - 2 months ago

Recent Promotions and ChangesWhat’s this?
Michael Cosentino, Director of Design & User Experience
was Head of Design & User Experience - last month

Popular ProfilesWhat’s this?
Matthew Saltmarsh, Editor/writer/producer
Barbara Staszewski, Editor
Ciara O'Rourke, Editorial Newsroom Intern
stephanie de Longevialle, Advertising Director
Chuck Jackson, Copy Editor

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