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| 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.
Underscore Media, a new creator-led media venture dedicated to New York sports, is built around three established New York sports personalities, Sal Licata, Jimmy Traina, and John Jastremski.
McClatchy, which owns 29 daily papers across 14 states (including The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star), launches a wave of layoffs that extends to at least 13 of those papers... The Toledo Blade, which was founded in 1835, is set to shut down on Dec. 31, unless owner Block Communications manages to find a buyer for it... A bill awaiting approval by California governor Gavin Newsom would give local newsrooms a boost. 
Fox News Media issued a pretty sparse release to announce the departure of one of its stars. “Effective today, Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media,” it reads.
Brunswick Group partner John Simons has joined CNN as senior director of business & media. He held top jobs at Time and the Wall Street Journal.
WNET, the nation’s largest public media company, names Edward O’Keefe its next president and CEO, effective September 21. O’Keefe succeeds Neal Shapiro, who becomes president emeritus and will retire at the end of the year... The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would empower news publishers and other content providers to defend themselves by mandating transparency for all bots crawling their sites, in introduced in the House by Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL) and Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC)... Google gets socked by European Union regulators with a $1 billion fine for using the platform’s dominance as a search engine to illegally undercut competition.
