Nearly 60% of those reading Times articles now do so on smartphones and tablets, often receiving them via Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, search engines and apps. That means fewer of them encounter the full package of reading that editors so painstakingly put together. Traffic to the Times’s home-page has fallen by half from its peak in 2011; only a third of readers of Times articles ever visit it. This makes it a lot harder to persuade them to consume a broader range of the paper’s content, and to charge them for it.
Other newspapers regard the Times as a farsighted digital pioneer. It now claims 760,000 digital subscribers, and in recent months it has completed a sleek online makeover and launched new mobile apps. So if the Times is anxious, they should be too. The authors of its internal review are right to worry about losing readers. It is true that some of its new rivals barely make money, and others, such as Business Insider and Quartz, are believed to be losing it, whereas last year the Times had more than $150m in profits. But the times are changing fast and the Times must change with them.
