Times to go print-free

Are you one of those who loudly proclaim "There will always be a newspaper - nothing else matches it for convenience and cost. People like paper."?
Meet a New Yorker name Arthur Sulzberger, who says that he doesn't know if the New York Times will still be printed on paper half a decade from now — and he doesn't care. The web is good enough for Arthur.
Which probably sounds more important when you add Art's job to the sentence - owner, chairman and publisher of the New York Times. Here's an excerpt from a piece in Harretz.com, an Isreli website:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years? 
"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says. 
Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet. 
The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we're leading there," he points out.

By "leading there" he's probably referring to his website's reader ship stats which now trump their print subscribers on a daily basis - 1.5 million web readers a day vs 1.1 million print subscribers, an astonishing turnaround from only a few years back.
The Times is in a period of transition, Sulzberger says, a transition that will end when they print the last paper edition of the paper.
In the interview Sulzberger says staff have made the transition to a universal news deks from separate web  and a print news operations, a transition that was "tough" but necessary, he says.
The Times will continue to charge for their content he says.
Read the rest of the interview here.

>Check out the comment below from the folks at the Fading to Black blog - who say that Sulzberger is qualifying his statement in a speech to staff today (Wed). - bd

Bill Dunphy

Comments

[Journalism Fan]

As we noted yesterday, the New York Observer is reporting Sulzberger is clarifying his statement today. NYT print is here to stay.

http://mediafade.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-york-times-here-to-stay-sulzberger.html

[tom hogue]

Could be that the publisher is using a clever tabloid-style stunt by predicting the demise of the grey lady. Good attention-getting device, for sure. The key in the statement is the hard work they are doing to create a unified desk for filing web and print stories.