NYT Catches Up in Design, Layoffs
The New York Times is suddenly seeming rather 21st century. The stalwart publication announced Monday it will phase in a new design and shrink its Web width by the first quarter of 2008. If the old design’s been good this many decades, another 18 months won’t hurt, right?
Anyway, the Old Gray Lady’s also looking a little more modern for a completely different reason, too: The changes mean the loss of 250 production department positions. For those keeping score, that’s about 10-12 times the average number of TOTAL employees at one of MPA’s member newspapers.
Your editor remembers when computer pagination came to his first newspaper way back in the 80s. The production staff went from eight employees down to two, virtually overnight. It’s been one long web width reduction and frequent hard disk error ever since.