New York Times newsroom cuts

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/new-york-times-plans-staff-reductions/?src=tp

 

I wonder if the NYT could ever get away with just eliminating all of its NY sports beats. Just going WSJ with sports - issue and trend stories, a business story here and there, a good feature, and that's that. Seems like the most efficient use of resources the NYT could perform - and this is probably the case with many, many major metro papers, is to slash sports travel to the bone. I can't see that the Times would suffer much in circulation and advertising for the money they would save.

 

The Times could. I doubt any other paper could.

 

Sadly, others will follow suit.
I'm tired of bending and seeing others bend over to take it without any lubricant.

 

The Washington Times tried that with "less than satisfactory" results...

 

You could cover every major sports beat for around $250,000. That's not including golf, auto racing, tennis, etc. Still, not a ton of money. And if you don't travel, you give up any authority in your coverage. I would rather lose a couple of sports feature writers, if nec. Your beats are still going to drive your enterprise coverage. Example: Boston Globe story yesterday on the beer-drinking, chicken-eating Red Sox.

 

There is plenty of market for the NYT's local beat coverage. Don't take this as a knock on the job the tabloids do, because that's not what I'm saying, but there are genuine sports fans who simply don't like that approach. It is possible to care about the Yankees -- and care about them more than just casually -- and tune out anything more than one or two stories a day as being excessive chatter and never listen to sports talk radio and never follow a sports writer on Twitter. The Times offers more than enough sports coverage if you are a normal adult, and you can't dump this coverage without seriously pissing off a few hundred thousand readers in one fell swoop.

 

That seems OBSCENELY low.

 

This is what I was wondering. I don't live in New York, so I skip over the New York City news and sports coverage in my paper every day. It almost seems out of place in what, to me, is, much like the Wall Street Journal, a national newspaper that just so happens to be headquartered in New York. I was curious about whether New Yorkers think about the Times as a local paper, or whether they think about it like I do, and think of the Post and Newsday as their local papers.

 

Local.

 

That's actually pretty cool of you. We always had to share at my shop.