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Comments to date: 26. This is page 2 of 3. | |
Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 10:29pm on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 | Arthur Sulzberger and New York Times Company CEO Janet Robinson issued a statement about the company's debt on July 15, 2009:
"To Our Colleagues,
As many of you read, yesterday we announced the sale of WQXR, “The Radio Station of The New York Times.” This is another step in the realignment of our portfolio of properties and our initiative to reduce our debt.
Over the past six months or so, one question that we have heard time and time again from employees and others is: “What is the state of the Company’s debt?” Given that and the news about WQXR, we thought it would be worthwhile to discuss it with you today.
The Company carries approximately $1 billion in debt but of that amount only about $45 million matures before 2011, and we expect to repay that in November with cash flow from operations and our revolving credit agreement. The majority of our debt isn’t due until more than five years from now – in 2015. As a recent article in AdAge asked, “But can it [the Times Company] last through 2011? As it turns out, we think the answer is yes, and then some.”
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 11:17pm on Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Time magazine had "10 Questions for Bill Keller," the executive editor of the New York Times. Keller said of the newspaper's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war:
"It was partly the insatiable desire for scoops people in the Administration were feeding about the potential threat in Iraq," said Keller of The New York Times' coverage ahead of the Iraq War. "But a lot of it was just that we floated along with the conventional wisdom, the worst enemy of journalism."
The full story:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1909597,00.html
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 11:38am on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | In an interesting profile of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim from the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright asked "El Ingeniero" about his investment of $250 million in the New York Times in late 2008:
"I asked Slim why he had invested in the Times. "We think it's the best newspaper," he said. "The best brand... We believe in media content. We think paper will disappear, but not the content. The content will be more important." I asked him if he read the Times. "Only when I'm in the U.S.," he admitted.
The full profile:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_wright
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 5:12pm on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | John M. Geddes, managing editor of the New York Times, was asked about the relationship between journalists and public relations reps on May 31, 2009 in the newspaper's "Talk to the Newsroom" feature:
"For decades, journalists and public relations reps have always seemed to regard each other as necessary evils. To journalists, P.R. people push stories that aren’t stories and prevent them from getting unfettered access to the principals involved in a story. To P.R. people, journalists too often summarily reject legitimate ideas and are too ready to block them from getting their legitimate messages out to the public. And yet … the best of each group need one another, and successfully form good mutual relationships.
At their core, those roles remain the same, but on the periphery there’s change aplenty.
Stephanie Strom, one of our reporters, says that technology has had an impact. “The ability to reach us in a variety of ways, i.e. via e-mail, phone, mobile devices, Twitter, Facebook, etc., means that the number of P.R. people I have to deal with has increased geometrically,” she says.
Steve Lohr, another of our reporters, notes that the creation of our own blogs has resulted in an increased flow of story pitches: “They know the hurdle is lower than for a fully reported piece for the paper, and they follow the blogs closely.”
And Stephanie says things haven’t gotten easier for P.R. people, either. She said she’s been told that the explosion of ways to reach the public beyond the traditional media has taxed P.R. people who find themselves reaching out to bloggers, Web journalists and other newly founded organizations with varying and evolving pedigrees of professionalism.
So yes, there is Sturm und Drang out there, but it accents what remains unchanged. It is probably the one-on-one relationships that matter, and they take time to forge."
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 11:37am on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | Reporters twitter while Times burns...
The New York Times announced through Twitter on May 26, 2009 that Jennifer Preston will have the newly created job of "social media editor" for the newspaper.
FishbowlNY reported:
"Though some critics have predicted that Preston will only be a Twitter cop for micro-blogging NYT reporters and editors, she told FishbowlNY that her job was actually going to be much more.
"I'll be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid changes in this new medium," Preston told us, noting that Twitter and other social media sites can be "an absolutely fabulous tool" for journalists to use. "My plan is to work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and folks here across the newsroom to explore together how we can use these tools journalistically."
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 10:08pm on Monday, May 25th, 2009 | The New York Times won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting on April 20, 2009:
"Awarded to The New York Times Staff for its swift and sweeping coverage of a sex scandal that resulted in the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, breaking the story on its Web site and then developing it with authoritative, rapid-fire reports."
The prize is awarded for a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news, with special emphasis on the speed and accuracy of the initial coverage, presented in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 10:35pm on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | The Newspaper Guild members of the Communications Workers of America ratified a 5% pay cut at the New York Times, the Guild reported on May 4, 2009:
"Guild members at both New York Times units, newspaper and digital, voted overwhelmingly on Monday to ratify a 5 percent pay cut through the end of the year, the centerpiece of a package Guild leaders negotiated in response to a management proposal in late March. Times Guild members at the newspaper voted 377 to 36 (with two abstentions) to ratify the pay cut agreement, which includes 10 additional paid days off, while members of the Guild’s digital unit ratified the agreement by a 50-0 vote. As a result, pay rates of more than 1300 newspaper and online employees will be reduced starting Tuesday, May 5. Times management representatives had proposed the cut, identical to the one imposed on nonunion employees on April 1, as a way of saving up to $4.5 million without layoffs, which they said would have numbered around 80, including 70 in the Newsroom. But they refused during negotiations to assure employees that there would be no involuntary job cuts for the duration of the pay cuts, which expire on Dec. 31. “Because our members know these are extraordinarily tough times for the news business, they were willing to pitch in to help the company cut costs without layoffs,” said New York Guild President Bill O’Meara. “But if management comes back in a few months and cuts jobs despite the cooperation of our members, I think they will find that the reservoir of goodwill will have run dry.”
The full story:
http://www.newsguild.org/index.php?ID=7263
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 1:54pm on Monday, May 18th, 2009 | David Carr wrote an interesting article about the future of the New York Times online, called "The Times and the Future," on May 17, 2009:
Some interesting bits of information:
-- The New York Times web site "has 20 million or so unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen Online, and about 3 million people who stop by all the time."
-- "The company has said it is not for sale, no matter how many people circle around it, nor is it in imminent danger of default or bankruptcy, and it has the flexibility to run the business."
-- "The decline in advertising, including the deep troubles at The Boston Globe, led to a $74.5 million loss in the first quarter, and company leaders have indicated that it will probably yield a similar level of red ink for the second quarter. Among the more ominous figures to emerge from the first-quarter results was an 8 percent decline in digital advertising revenue."
The full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/business/media/18carr.html?ref=business
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 10:34pm on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | The New York Times is raising its newsstand prices, WNBC TV New York reported on May 5, 2009:
"The New York Times is raising its newsstand prices for the third time in less than two years as a severe advertising slump forces readers to shoulder more of the costs of producing newspapers.
With the latest changes announced Tuesday, individual copies of The New York Times on Mondays through Saturdays will have doubled to $2 since July 2007.
The upcoming increase, effective June 1, will boost the Times' weekday price by 50 cents, or 33 percent, from the current price of $1.50. The Times, which has the third-highest U.S. circulation on weekdays, increased the weekday price by 25 cents during each of the previous two summers.
The New York Times also is raising the price for its Sunday edition, which is the nation's top-selling newspaper on that day. Sunday's national and Northeast editions will cost $6, an increase of $1. In the New York area, it will cost $5, also a dollar more.
Home delivery rates aren't changing for now. That means most of the Times' readers won't be affected by the June 1 increases because home delivery accounts for nearly two-thirds of the newspaper's weekday circulation and more than 70 percent of the Sunday circulation."
The full story:
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/us_world/NATLNew-York-Times-Will-Soon-Cost-2.html
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 3:43pm on Friday, April 24th, 2009 | The New York Times Company will be sold. That is the bold prediction of Jon Friedman, writing on April 24, 2009 at MarketWatch:
"Something unexpected occurred Tuesday night when I served as a panelist at a New York Financial Writers Association gathering.
At one point, the moderator, the redoubtable Myron Kandel, asked me to assess the future of the New York Times Co. Taking a deep breath, as if to acknowledge the gravity of the issue, I predicted that the Times Co.'s woes would intensify. The stock price, I intoned, would fall so low that an opportunistic buyer, eager to obtain the Times' prestige and influence, would swoop in.
This was no longer a case of if. It was simply a matter of when. I then suggested that if the suitor was not to the Times' liking, eventually a white knight -- Bloomberg L.P., to be exact -- would be invited to take control.
Bloomberg offers the Times ample prestige of its own, thanks largely to the strong reputations of its founder Michael Bloomberg, who is currently serving his second term as New York mayor, and its news executive Norman Pearlstine, the former top editor of magazine publisher Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal."
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