If you see a New York Times writer panhandling for change on the A train this week, you'll know why. The New York Times can only do so much with its Lebanese-Mexican sugar daddy. It's time to do the boarding house thing.
The New York Times is packing up several floors of its operation and will rent out the empty space to make revenue, according to an email sent to staff this week.
Around 400 NYT writers, the letter says, will have to vacate their current work spaces (including corner offices) and consolidate. Their work areas will be “redesigned” to better maximize efficiency — and to allow the Times to lease the vacant newsrooms on least eight floors in its flagship building.
Executives Arthur Sulzberger and Mark Thompson, who author the memo, insist that the downsizing is merely a function of “modernization,” and that the purpose is to create an office that is more “of the moment.”
The moment being a world in which the New York Times, which imagines that it rules the universe, is less needed than ever.
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
Sorry. The room where we set the agenda for the country is now for rent.