From a New York Times story by Marc Tracy headlined “The Times Tops 6 Million Subscribers as Ad Revenues Plummet”:
In the first three months of the year, The New York Times Company added more digital subscribers than it had gained during any quarter since it started charging readers for online content in 2011. But that increase was driven by widespread interest in news of the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the U.S. economy and cut deeply into The Times’s advertising revenue.
By the end of a dramatic quarter, Times employees had grown accustomed to working remotely, and readers were flocking to the newspaper’s website, drawn by articles on the coronavirus and its effects that were offered at no charge.
Many of those readers bought subscriptions. The company reported on Wednesday that it had netted 587,000 new digital subscriptions during the quarter. The majority — 468,000 — were for the core news product, and the remaining 119,000 were for other digital products, including apps like Cooking and Crossword. . . .
In keeping with a trend that has affected other news organizations during the pandemic, The Times attracted new readers while the money it brought in from advertising plummeted. . . .
“The Times’s business model, with its growing focus on digital subscription growth and diminishing reliance on advertising, is very well positioned to ride out this storm and thrive in a post-pandemic world,” [chief executive Mark] Thompson said. . . .
Roland A. Caputo, the chief financial officer, said on Wednesday’s call that declines in home-delivery circulation were in line with recent quarters. He added that Starbucks’s decision in August to cease distributing Times copies at its locations had a greater year-over-year impact on the decline in print circulation in the first quarter than the decline in newsstand sales likely caused by the pandemic. . . .
The Times’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan have been all but empty since March 13, with employees working remotely. “The earliest day we will ask people who are currently working remotely to return to our offices in New York will be on Sept. 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day,” said a memo to employees on Tuesday. . . .
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