New York Times to cut about 100 newsroom jobs, shut down Opinion app

The New York Times plans to cut nearly 100 newsroom jobs, according to a memo sent to staff on Wednesday, the newspaper reported.

In the memo from the paper’s executive editor, published by the media news site Poynter.org, Dean Baquet told employees that the Times hoped to meet the number through “voluntary buyouts.”

“But if we don’t get there we will be forced to do layoffs,” wrote Baquet, who is a former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times.

The buyouts come while there are “promising signs in digital advertising and digital subscriptions,” wrote Baquet.

Baquet added he would “reserve the right to say no to people who request a buyout but whose jobs and talents are critical to our mission.”

Baquet stepped down from the L.A. Times in 2006 after opposing additional staff cuts that he said he feared would threaten the quality of the newspaper.

A separate memo from the New York Times’ chief executive, Mark Thompson, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. also announced that the paper was shutting down the NYT Opinion app and making its NYT Now app available on smartphones only.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of the New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” they wrote in a memo.

Thompson and Sulzberger said that in the third quarter of this year the New York Times website “added more than 40,000 net new digital subscribers, the largest number of quarterly additions since 2012.”

The last round of buyouts at the newspaper came in 2012 and at the beginning of 2013.

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