International Herald Tribune

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:14pm on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

On October 7, 2008, Forbes.com reported that the New York Times Company plans to shut down the International Herald Tribune web site:

"The New York Times' Web site is getting more global, and IHT.com is going bye-bye.

"The Times told staff in an internal e-mail Tuesday that the paper's flagship Web site will soon become host to news from sister paper the International Herald Tribune and that the Tribune's site will be shuttered. The move will require "hard decisions about jobs at the IHT," and the company is now looking to "reassign or relocate people," according to the memo.

"In an interview Tuesday, NYTimes.com General Manager Vivian Schiller insisted that "it's absolutely, positively not about cost savings." Rather, it's about growth, she said.

The Forbes story included: "The IHT site has long been an anachronism in an age where the flagship NYTimes.com was available anywhere in the world. Despite a spirited revamping earlier this decade that gave it a niche among expatriate Americans, Paris-based IHT.com never really got the focus of management in New York or the funding to truly experiment with differentiating itself from the flagship sister site.

"As a result, it remained dwarfed and smothered by its larger sibling. NYTimes.com reached roughly 19.4 million unique visitors in August, up year-over-year from just under 8 million. By contrast, comScore reports IHT.com reached 2.5 million unique visitors in August."