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]