Strategy at the New York Times? Goes a little some­thing like this…according to their earn­ings call:

There are four key ele­ments to our strategy –

• intro­du­cing new products and ser­vices, both in print and online;
• aggress­ively man­aging our costs;
• rebal­an­cing our port­fo­lio of busi­nesses both by mak­ing acquis­i­tions and by divest­ing prop­er­ties that no longer meet their fin­an­cial tar­gets or fit stra­tegic­ally within the Times Company;
• and build­ing our digital research and devel­op­ment capability.

[BTW cf. McClatchy:

We are focused on four major areas:

• driv­ing new rev­en­ues, with a par­tic­u­lar emphasis on online advertising;
• focus­ing on grow­ing total audience;
• provid­ing high qual­ity pub­lic ser­vice journalism;
• and redu­cing our cost structure.]

How else does it look for the Times?

The national print cat­egor­ies where we saw the largest declines were tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions as wire­less car­ri­ers reduced advert­ising; trans­port­a­tion, as inter­na­tional and domestic air­lines cut back their spend­ing due to a rise in fuel costs; and national auto­mot­ive, which saw advert­ising declines from domestic car manufacturers.

Clas­si­fied advert­ising decreased in all three major cat­egor­ies, real estate, recruit­ment, and auto­mot­ive. [Ouch]

Retail advert­ising rev­en­ues were down due to decreased advert­ising from depart­ment stores, home fur­nish­ing stores, and mass mar­ket advertisers…

New products tar­get­ing lux­ury cat­egor­ies helped off­set some of the ad rev­enue declines in the quarter.

In total, our digital busi­nesses grew nearly 12% in the quarter and gen­er­ated $82.9 mil­lion, or 11% of the company’s rev­en­ues. [And at that growth rate, it will take until 2026–7 to reach the his­toric 2007–8 rev­enue figures…]

Inter­net advert­ising rev­en­ues increased 16% in the quarter.

In April, the rate of decline in advert­ising rev­en­ues is expec­ted to be in the mid single digits. This is an improve­ment from our March per­form­ance and is due mainly to shifts in the tim­ing of Easter and in the pub­lic­a­tion of Key magazine.

…it is clear that the Wall Street Journal is pos­i­tion­ing itself quite dif­fer­ently in regard to its over­all cov­er­age, broad­en­ing it very much into the inter­na­tional and polit­ical arena, and with the launch of their magazine enter­ing into broader life­style coverage.

…the page view growth itself is obvi­ously some­thing that we intend to mon­et­ize and we mon­et­ize it in two ways, both through our premium dis­play sales force, which obvi­ously gets the best rates, and … we do get very sig­ni­fic­antly higher rates than most web­sites do in the aver­age. And we also mon­et­ize it through rela­tion­ships with a broad vari­ety of ad networks.

There are a lot of web 2.0 com­pan­ies look­ing for exits now but very few of them have the kind of rev­enue or cash flow that we would look for to have a mean­ing­ful impact on our business.

[from Seek­ing Alpha]