August 6, 2007
Gray Lady Loses 1.5 Inches: New NY Times Size
Today, the New York Times finally made its move to a 12 inch-width format with today's paper. The paper will stay the same price ($1.25 on weekdays and Saturday, $4.00 on Sunday) and will charge the same amount to advertisers, but can/may add more pages. Headlines and columns are narrowed, but the body copy type is the same (the spacing between letters, though, is more closed up). Interestingly, the crossword itself looks generally the same size, though the clues columns are narrower.
Originally, the NY Times was going to change its size next year, but spokeswoman Diane McNulty explained that the Times was able to get its press configured sooner. The Times expects to save $7-10 million a year with the change.
Other newspapers in the 12-inch width format: The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Recently, the Observer went to a tabloid format, which makes us think the NY Sun might be the only NYC daily that publishes in the 13" six-column broadsheet format. The Sun's ad rates specify a 13-inch width format, but our wooden ruler says the paper is just 12.5 inches wide, or just a half-inch broader than most major dailies.
Above, yesterday's NY Times under today's edition.
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"The paper will stay the same price ($1.25 on weekdays and Saturday, $4.00 on the weekend) "
Saturday is part of the weekend. The sentence should read:
The paper will stay the same price ($1.25 on weekdays and Saturday, $4.00 on Sunday)
A great rack will only get you so far, Chung... you've got to watch the little things.
The final line of the above comment is totally uncalled for. I agreed with the criticism until coming upon the misogynistic insult.
what insult? i said she had a NICE rack.... not a bad one.
Raise the price and then give you a smaller product. God bless capitalism!
The Monday paper is already a joke - bad enough we don't get breaking news on Saturday and Sunday, now Monday is the same - just trend and analysis-type articles. Seems the paper just wants to be a lifestyles publication - Wednesday through Friday with things like Dining, Styles, Weekend, etc. Hey, I can get that stuff from any number of magazines - why bother with the NYT for that?
"Most of the News That's Fit to Print"
Didn't they just reduce the size from like 15" to 13" recently?
The Times is a shell of its former self. I won't pay for the rag anymore. I'll read it online for free. How many stupid pieces have they run in the last week about the woes of the millionaire class? They're the print equivalent of John Edwards. Whine about the two Americas on the Op-Ed pages and then run at least one section per day that only the wealthy could care about: Travel (let's only review $1000 a night hotels and resorts!), Fashion (Jeans crack the $400 a pair barrier!), Food (We visited the latest $300 a plate restaurant) and Real Estate (Here's a cute gay couple in Chelsea that renovated a cozy little love nest for only $2 million!).
Print is dead.
the spacing between letters = kerning
Toby (comment #4 above) is correct; NYT three weeks ago raised the price from $1 to $1.25. Smart thinking to do that before shrinking the format.
There's a cute headline at Gawker today about the change: "All The News That's Fit To Pr-" It reports that writers at NYT are being told to write shorter articles to accomodate the format change.
As a long-time and avid NYT reader, I wish I could find fault with #9's criticism, but I fear it's pretty accurate. I still subscribe, because it's far better than any other daily (certainly better than the cheesy Chicago rags!), and because of the pleasure of doing the "official" daily crossword on newsprint. But I miss the "olden days" (i.e., last week) already.
Hopefully this means they'll print fewer wedding announcements.
Comment #9 is correct - that's long been the case.
As for #5, about no breaking news from Friday through Sunday - that's not true. At any rate, politicians know that Saturday papers have the lowest readership, so they rarely announce stuff on Friday unless it's stuff they want to be under the radar. So there's naturally less political news on the weekends.
I think it is a sad note if they decide on less content. #8 has it right--not everyone is in the highest income bracket, and the Times should maybe pay a bit of attention to the lower 95 percent of the income range when doing travel, real estate, fashion and restaurant reviews, etc., because some of us can read and would like to see the occasional affordable option. But hey, if I wrote reviews, I'd choose the $1,000 per night hotel too.
They've been losing "authority" for the last ten years or so, and it's unfortunate they keep moving in that direction, regardless of size. I guess this goes with the dumbing down of everything else in the U.S. God forbid raise the standards...
#13 is correct: Saturday is when politicians and companies dump info they are obliged to make public but don't really want to. Some people believe its the most important day to read the paper.
I did not notice.
Lest we forget the Battery Park City Broadsheet!
Raise the price and then give you a smaller product. God bless capitalism!
[4] Posted by: Toby von Meistersinger | August 6, 2007 9:53 AM
Obviously, the NY Times practices the liberal form of capitalism.
All you haters love the Times. Without it we'd be stuck with tabloid-right-wing propaganda (Post), McNews (USA Today), or unfortunately, the now deflowered Wall Street Journal.
The Times is the most visited on line, and that's what matters for the future.
Number 10, the proper term is tracking. Many novice typographers make this mistake.
Kerning only refers to the space between two letters. Tracking is similar, but it applies overall to a large group of letters. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(typography)
You can track an entire paragraph “loose” yet kern just a W-o pair “tight,” for example.
[20] That's interesting. I've always referred to "tracking" as "kerning", as [10] identified it. Thanks for the link. This one includes a graphic example of the difference between tracking and kerning. You learn something new every day.
Like a lot of "old ladies" the "old Gray Lady" is shrinking and falling into dementia......
The Times is still better than 99% of the newspapers in print.