 |
| Mark Thompson |
The New York Times Co. today reported Q1 revenues inched ahead 1.0 percent to $443.6M while operating profit tumbled 21 percent to $27.3M due to a 15.2 percent decline in advertising sales to $106.1M.
CEO Mark Thompson warned investors that Q2 advertising is expected to fall from 50 percent to 55 percent "with limited visibility beyond that."
The COVID-19 crisis has rocked the NYTC's key luxury, media, entertainment and financial advertising categories.
Thompson talked up the NYTC's robust performance on the digital front.
The company added a record-setting 587K net new digital subscriptions during the quarter despite allowing free access to the majority of its coronavirus coverage. Eighty percent of new digital subscribers were for the core news site, while the balance were for crossword puzzles, cooking and audio products.
NYTC now has more than 4M digital-only news subscribers, 1M subs for non-news products and 6M in total print/digital subs.
Thompson said the NYTC "will emerge from this global crisis with a distinctive and valuable advertising revenue stream to complement a digital news subscription business which is now by far the largest and most successful in the world."
The company posted a 5.4 percent rise in subscription revenues to $285.4M. Digital revenues surged 18.3 percent to $130M, while print revenues declined 3.4 percent to $155.4M.
"The revenue from those subscriptions—and our strong balance sheet—give us real confidence, not just that we can remain financially sound through the pandemic, but also that we can safely invest in our digital growth strategy and continue to hire new talent to help execute it," said Thompson.
Versant Media Group, the NBCUniversal cable TV spin-off, today reported its first financial results as 2025 revenues dipped 5.3 percent to $6.7B and standalone EBITDA dropped 9.1 percent to $2.2B.
Trump Media & Technology Group is discussing a spin-off of the Truth Social platform following the expected closing of its $6B merger deal with TAE Technologies... Condé Nast sells off Them, the digital LGBTQ-focused platform it launched in 2017, to Equalpride, publisher of Out, The Advocate, Out Traveler, Health PLUS Wellness and Pride.com... CBS News has parted ways with longevity influencer Peter Attia, one of the 19 contributors that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss brought on as part of her plan to present a wider variety of voices on the platform. 
Symbolic.ai forms a partnership with News Corp to begin using the company’s AI-native publisher platform in the newsrooms of News Corp publications to augment research, writing and publishing... Mediaite launches a newsletter that promises to give readers a summary of—media newsletters... The Fund for American Studies launches the Journalism Excellence Fellowship, a program that will provide promising young journalists the opportunity to work alongside top writers, reporters, and media professionals.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which has roots going back to 1786, is going out of business, the paper’s owners, Block Communications, announced on Jan. 7... GQ editor Will Welch is stepping down to take on a new Paris-based role with the musician Pharrell, who is also men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton... Semafor says it has raised $30 million on a $330 million valuation, following its first profitable year. 
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach an agreement that will make a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars available for use by Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform... CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has moved Tony Dokoupil, a co-host at “CBS Mornings” since 2019, into the anchor’s chair for the “CBS Evening News,” following the departure of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois... USA Today editor-in-chief Caren Bohan has left the paper.
