New York Times to consolidate paper's sections

By Robert MacMillan

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co plans to consolidate some sections in the metropolitan edition of its namesake newspaper to reduce costs, the publisher said on Friday.

Starting Monday, October 6, the paper will blend its Metro section with its main news section on Monday through Saturday and combine its business and sports pages into one section on Tuesday through Friday.

The "A" section includes the Times' international and national news reports as well as the editorial and opinion pages.

"Given the business challenges we face, we are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs that do not affect the quality or quantity of the journalism we provide to our readers," Times Co Chairman and New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr wrote in a memo to staff released on Friday.

"We are not reducing the space devoted to Metro or Sports news," Sulzberger wrote. "This is simply a way to produce the paper more efficiently."

The changes will only affect the New York edition because the national edition already is set up in a similar fashion, Sulzberger wrote.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis declined to say how much money the paper will save.

An article posted on the Times website on Friday quoted unidentified executives as saying the savings would be several million dollars a year.

The savings will come at the production stage, which will result in single runs of the paper being printed on more nights than the paper currently has today, Sulzberger wrote.

"That said, we don't make these changes lightly," he wrote. "We care deeply about what our New York readers think about their edition. We know that many of our readers like and are comfortable with our current layout.

Sulzberger is part of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has controlled the Times for more than a century.

The Times has been searching for ways to cut costs as, like most other U.S. newspapers, its advertising revenue falls amid a weak economy and a steady migration of readers away from its printed edition to the Internet.

New York Times Media Group advertising revenue fell 15.3 percent in July 2008, compared with the same period a year ago, a similar drop to that of many other U.S. papers.

Overall U.S. newspaper advertising revenue fell 16 percent in the second quarter to about $8.8 billion, according to figures released this week by the Newspaper Association of America.

New York Times shares rose 9 cents, or 0.68 percent to $13.41 at mid-afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Robert MacMillan, editing by Richard Chang)