NY Times: Industry retrench painful. Why? Let's get excited about change. What if the newspaper became a new, exciting product. Peter Van

N.Y. Times to Reduce Page Size, Slash Jobs

07.18.2006, 07:05 AM

The New York Times plans to cut 250 jobs and shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them one-and-a-half inches narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday's edition.
The newspaper's plans include closing a printing plant in Edison, N.J. The plant's workload will shift to another in New York City, the article said, estimating the moves would save the company $42 million per year. The job cuts account for about one-third of the Times' total production work force of 800, the newspaper said.
The reduction in the size of its pages would mean a loss of 11 percent of the space devoted to news, but the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss.
"That's a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably," Executive Editor Bill Keller was quoted as saying. "The smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form."
The article, noting that USA Today and The Washington Post have cut their size, pointed to rising newsprint costs and the loss of readers and ad dollars to the Internet.
"It's painful to watch an industry retrench," Keller said. "But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau."