The New York Times will reduce the size of its newspaper, trimming the news by 5%, and will close one of its printing facilities to save money, it announced today. The changes will result in the loss of 250 jobs:

The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.

The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs. ...

The reduction in the size of The Times will mean a loss of 5 percent of the space the paper devotes to news. If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.

“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,” Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.

I guess that Times Select idea hasn't panned out to well, has it?

The Times, and apparently also the Wall Street Journal, will find themselves no different than any other newspaper in the country. As more consumers turn to the Internet for the news, the need for newsprint will drop accordingly. Newspapers will have to rethink their business process. Eventually, they will find themselves in the news-delivery service, and that the medium (newsprint) has less importance than the news itself.

Will that change be painful? Of course. However, those who adopt this paradigm early will have the easier transition. Newsprint will probably always be around, or at least for a long while, but the daily delivery process has been eclipsed by the new news cycle. Stories do not break at deadline any more -- and the concept of deadlines and putting the paper to bed will be the first casualties. The Times still holds almost all of its stories until midnight, when they release them on the Internet. Competition with the wire services will eventually mean that papers like the Times will have to release stories as they get approved -- meaning their websites will continually update all through the 24-hour day.

That will eliminate the daily delivery, and as more homes get broadband access to the Internet, that paper on the doorstep becomes increasingly anachronistic. It will get the same slow death that afflicted encyclopedias on the bookshelf: it's out of date as soon as it's received. Consumers demand up-to-the-moment news, and the paper is a museum of yesterday's headlines.

This announcement from the Times is just another step along that process. It's not unique to the Times and doesn't reflect its egregious editorial policies. Newsprint will continue to shrink, and in this case, the process has become literal.

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