NYT Moves National Deadline Up By 30 Minutes To Save A “Significant” Amount Of Money

We’re just posting this because we think it’s fascinating how tiny changes can result in apparently huge cost savings, and nobody had to lose their job for it.

Yesterday New York Times managing editor John Geddes sent out a memo, posted by Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zach Seward to Times staff announcing that the paper was moving its first national edition deadline to 9:00pm from 9:30 pm.

“We’re doing this to save money,” Geddes wrote. “By closing 30 minutes earlier we’ll be able to include papers printed in some of our national sites in shipments made by other publishers to distant markets. That means we can drop other, more costly NYT-only transportation arrangements. By piggybacking our shipments in these markets, we expect to save a significant amount of money and reach even more cities earlier.”

Whaddaya know.

The memo’s reprinted after the jump.

To the staff,

On Sunday, Oct 18th, we’ll be moving the deadline for our first national edition to 9:00 pm from 9:30 for our Monday through Saturday papers.

We’re doing this to save money. By closing 30 minutes earlier we’ll be able to include papers printed in some of our national sites in shipments made by other publishers to distant markets. That means we can drop other, more costly NYT-only transportation arrangements. By piggybacking our shipments in these markets, we expect to save a significant amount of money and reach even more cities earlier .

Naturally there’ll be some rare nights when the earlier national deadlines and the timing of major news events collide. In those cases, we will, as we’ve done in the past, make adjustments to insure that readers of the early edition don’t miss the news.

We’re not making any changes in any of our other deadlines. That said, the earlier national deadline will mean that we will need to adjust some of our staffing and other schedules. We will also need to keep the gains we’ve made on our copy-flow progress by enforcing filing deadlines and getting stories into the editing pipeline efficiently.

Thanks,

John

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