Free Republic

The New York Times plans to cut 250 jobs and shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them 3.8 centimetres narrower, the newspaper reported in yesterday's edition. The newspaper's plans include closing a printing plant in Edison, N.J.The moves were estimated to save the company $42 million per year. The reduction in the size of its pages would mean a loss of 11 per cent of the space devoted to news, but the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss.

New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who famously got punched in the eye by a bicycle messenger in 2002, gets another shiner in the new issue of The New Yorker. In a must-read profile for media soothsayers, writer Ken Auletta raises the question of whether Pinch Sulzberger can survive journalistic embarrassments and shrinking profits. Auletta quotes a "family friend" asking, "Is Arthur going to get fired?" Though Auletta notes that The Times remains arguably "the world's finest newspaper," and the only one that generates more than $1 billion a year in advertising, he contends: "Within the newsroom, there is...