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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the NYT, but in my country newspapers are fighting for their lives, financially. Newspapers closing down and others laying off staff is a regular occurance.

Print newspapers are essentially dead. Online news? Barely anyone pays for that. Online with ads? Reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube pay zero dollars for the content they put ads on.

If you're in tech and you want to maximise your salary - a company's gotta have money before they can give it to you. And newspapers don't have money.

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The NYT has money.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/business/media/new-york-t...

> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, which ran from July through September, rose 16.1 percent to $104.2 million, from $89.8 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 7 percent to $640.2 million, compared with the same period in 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/business/media/new-york-t...

> The company’s adjusted operating profit for the quarter, from April through June, rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year before. Overall revenue increased 5.8 percent, to $625.1 million, compared with the same period in 2023.

Profit of $104.7 million a year. 5800 employees [1]. So a profit of $18k per employee.

A $40k wage gap between tech and journalism it'd be nice to close.

That's gonna be one difficult negotiation.

[1] https://www.nytco.com/

These are per-quarter numbers, not annual.

Ah, I must have misunderstood the rose to $104.7 million from $92.2 million a year

Even quadrupling the $18k per employee, you're still trying to get a $40k raise from an organisation with a profit of $72k per employee. That's going to be tough.

Far tougher than moving to a different job at a company with more money.

https://archive.is/FXzlC

https://archive.is/D7bzF

Why are you quoting operating profit instead of net income? The expenses included in net income are not optional.

I'm quoting the NYT's coverage of their own profitable quarter.

Net income seems to be healthy, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/04/earns-new...

Sure, but the workers don't have to take a shave to prop up a failing business model. Sure, they COULD just go somewhere else, but it's reasonable to first negotiate with the employer, because, ideally, the employer doesn't want a whole section of their workforce to just leave.

When I was much younger, a few years out of high school, I ended up being the last developer on a sinking ship, and had asked for a pay raise to get me up to where the highest paid of the employees who had left were, IIRC that was around $5/hr, and was denied. I should have used that as an RGE, but instead just hung on until around a year later when a job fell into my lap. But the employer would have been hurting if I left, and was definitely more expensive for them to lose me than it would have to keep me. But in the end, the parent company folded a couple years later because of a very, very bad bet they made.

It's the same in the US, but the NY Times is probably the most financially successful newspaper in the world at this point. They are not only the #1 news source by reputation, they made a huge push into digital very early and sell subscriptions to news, gaming (they have the #1 crossword and wordle), cooking, product reviews and sports. They supposedly make as much money on games as news which is why the message from the union has been to boycott wordle today.

I’d make the argument that the NYT is well positioned in the AI age to be an authority more so than before. The internet will be inundated with AI generated news, and the only way to keep your sanity is to check anything with a legitimate logo on the top of the site.

nyt makes tons of money from trump news. Its not the same as local news. Trump ironically revived "failing new york times" .

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