New York Times to Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs in '08

The New York Times has done a lot in its online division, in terms of offering content for free, leaning towards more supplemental income from advertising, and integrating with social networks like Facebook in order to further engage segmented audiences. Nevertheless, after years of fighting the printed industry trend and even a recent hiring freeze, The New York Times will be eliminating about 100 newsroom jobs over the course of this year, according to an article in The New York Times today.

Considering some of the staff cuts we’ve seen from others that participate in online markets in recent months, like AOL, Yahoo, EMI and iVillage, the percentage of those that will be eliminated from The New York Times is relatively small, given that The Times has over 1,300 employees that work in the newsroom. And as all companies look to do, The Times will try to avoid layoffs by not refilling positions that have become vacant, and by offering buyouts to others.

What one would gather from reading this article in The New York Times is that the newspaper company is finding a hard time lowering its operational costs, which would be a necessity to fully adapt to the changing distribution and advertising methods found in the online sector. I’ll be the first to admit that shifting gears, from printed to digital, and then onto free, is no easy task, and there are a lot of growing pains. The Times will need to continue to change a lot within the company structure in order to remain the longstanding powerhouse it is.