Days after it announced across the board 5% pay cuts for its staff, and 100 redundancies on the business side, the New York Times unveiled a Global Edition – a re-branded, or rather, de-branded International Herald Tribune, in an attempt to further integrate the two papers. But “unveiled” is a strong word – if you’re coming to the NYT’s site through its US home page, you could easily miss the link under the masthead.

The effort is being greeted with moderate enthusiasm at best; Gawker even posted Times Nukes Itself On Google – apparently “inept Times webmasters just killed hundreds of thousands of their own Google hits. … Instead of redirecting old iht.com links to the same stories on the new nytimes.com server, it simply redirected all content to the same new landing page.”

While the Times’ Global Edition Editor Martin Gottlieb sees the move as a way of “freeing up editorial energies,” I, for one, will miss the crisp design and the Euro lightness of the IHT. Farewell, my friend!

By the way – where do newspapers go when they die?

March 31st, 2009 by Camelia Checeanu | No Comments
Tags: digital · Media · newspapers