Forced to Reduce Overhead, New York Times Seeks Manager Buyouts
By Rob Scott
December 4, 2012
December 4, 2012
- In an effort to reduce overhead in an evolving and challenging advertising environment, The New York Times announced yesterday that it would offer buyout packages to certain newsroom employees.
- “While the primary goal of the buyout program is to trim managers and other nonunion employees from its books, the company is offering employees represented by the Newspaper Guild the chance to volunteer for buyout packages as well,” explains The New York Times in an article about its own plans.
- Jill Abramson, executive editor of the paper, explained in a letter to the staff that she was looking for 30 managers who are not union members to opt for buyout packages.
- “She stressed that the paper had been reducing as many newsroom expenses as possible, like leases on foreign and national bureaus,” notes the article, adding that recent hiring has restored the newsroom to its 2003 size — about 1,150 employees.
- “There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced,” Abramson explained in the letter. “I hope the needed savings can be achieved through voluntary buyouts but if not, I will be forced to go to layoffs among the excluded staff,” she added.
- “The newspaper industry as a whole is confronting a drastic falloff in advertising revenue,” notes the article. “Print advertising at The New York Times Company’s newspapers, which include The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, shrank 10.9 percent, according to the latest earnings report. Digital advertising across the company fell 2.2 percent.”
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Despite the success of the company’s online paywall, the digital business is unable to replace the revenue lost from shrinking advertising in the print business. “The average print subscriber generates about $1,100 of revenue for the paper per year,” explains Business Insider. “The average digital subscriber generates about $175 of revenue per year.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-new-york-times-is-firing-more-journalists-charts-2012-12
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