The New York Times Co. today reported $33M in Q3 operating profit compared to $8.9M a year ago due to higher digital subscription revenues and lower severance costs, which offset the continued decline in print ad sales.
Revenues advanced 6.1 percent to $385.6M, sparked by a 13.6 percent gain in subscription sales. Print advertising revenues tumbled 9.0 percent to $113.6M.
The company counted 2.5M paid digital-only subscribers as of the Sept. 30 end of Q3. That’s a net increase of 154K subs from the end of Q2 and a 59.1 percent hike from a year ago.
Digital advertising, which accounts for 43.3 percent of total ad revenues, grew 10.8 percent to $49.2M from the '16 period, driven by smartphone, programmatic and branded content revenues.
The 20 percent drop in print revenues was due to a fall-off of display advertising in the real estate, luxury, travel, media, technology and telecom categories.
CEO Mark Thompson anticipates high-teen growth in subscription revenues and high single-digit decline in ad revenues during Q4.
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.
Boston Globe Media acquires InstaTrac, a company that provides subscription-based services aimed at making government information easier to find, track, and understand... AARP names former New Republic CEO and publisher Michael Caruso as its SVP and chief content officer, unifying the organization's portfolio of media, live events and digital platforms... The Fund for American Studies, an educational nonprofit, awards its inaugural Journalism Excellence Fellowships.
Trump Media and Technology Group Corp. has replaced CEO and former California Congressman Devin Nunes with Kevin McGurn, a seasoned media sales executive.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is being bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit that is the parent organization of the Baltimore Banner... The British Broadcasting Corporation is axing approximately 2,000 jobs, about 10 percent of its work force... Snap, the company behind Snapchat, is also succumbing to layoff fever, announcing plans to lay off 16 percent of its employees, about 1,000 people.
CBS News Radio will go off the air on May 22, part of the axe-swinging managerial plan put into play by CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss... The Economist, which was first published in 1843, is changing hands. Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith has agreed to acquire a 26.9 percent stake in the publication from Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, her family and family foundation... Nexstar Media Group says it has closed its acquisition of TEGNA, the broadcast, digital media and marketing services company that was formed in 2015, when the Gannett Company split into two publicly traded companies.
