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Bowing to industrywide pressures, the nation's flagship newspaper is retrenching.
In a story published Saturday, the Grey Lady announced that several sections in the New York metro eidtion (what we get on our newsstands) will be folded into one another in a cost-saving move.
The Metro section will fall into Section A, alongside world and national news.
Tuesday through Friday, the Sports section will be at the back of the Business pages -- the article makes the point that there will not be LESS coverage (that would REALLY rile the readers).
And there is even a suggestion that the Sunday editorial and OpEd pages will also fold into the A-section. Since the opinion pages are such an integral part of the Sunday paper, one has to wonder if there are 'cost-saving' changes coming to the Week In Review section also.
As with other newspapers (including Advance's Star-Ledger and Gannett's Courier News), profits have dropped drastically as advertisers move away from print and readers turn more and more to the Web for constantly updated content.
I was introduced to the New York Times back in the paleolithic ages by my high school English teacher Mrs. Kane, who fanned the flames of curiosity about the wider world in her students.
A devoutly religious woman of the Irish persuasion, she was both a supporter of Dorothy Day and of intellectual freedom and rigor. She was the first Catholic I ever got to know well and her graciousness helped wash away the grimy bigotry of hardscrabble rural western New York Protestantism AND show me there was no shame in working with one's mind as well as one's hands.
The daily habit of paging through the Times from front to back these more than fifty years is a testament to her influence.
I can also remember the glory days of the 1970s and 80s when the Time introduced lilfestyle themed standalone sections that enhanced the bottom line by giving advertisers a more targeted audience.
But change is the order of the day. Many of those same advertisers use the Internet and I now get much of the Times online, well before it appears in its dead-tree version.
Will dead-tree newspapers go the way of homemade bread and one's own shaving mug and brush at the barbershop?
Even in reduced or altered form, I still need something to read with my morning coffee.
Just as monks and nuns must read their daily office.
Life wouldn't be right without it.
- New York Times: "Times plans to combine sections of the paper"
- Editor & Publisher: "NY Times' moves to fewer sections next month"
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