The newsonomics of The New York Times running in place

Ken Doctor reporting:
The New York Times is running faster under new CEO Mark Thompson, but it’s still running in place.
From today’s New York Times Co. first-half financials call and announcement, we know the headlines from the second quarter: Revenue loss at the company was held to 1 percent. Operating profit’s up 13 percent. Cash is up modestly, debt down a bit.
That’s an improvement over the first quarter, in which the company lost 2 percent of revenue. The numbers tell us the Times has a long shot at repeating its 2012 overall performance. For that year, it gained 0.3 percent in revenue. That was a true milestone — its first growth in a half-dozen years.
Now, within the Times strategy, we can see a clear two-year plan. It’s a next-stage digital transition plan, consisting of two parts:

• Keep the current business at as close to a steady run rate as possible over the next two years. This is the newsonomics of zero I’ve written about, wherein zero is a new floor. The zero math is simple: offset declining ad revenues with increasing all-access/digital-circulation revenues. The Times’ 2012 financial performance offered hope there. Zero is still but an aspiration for most metro publishers in the U.S. and Europe; just as they seemed to be getting closer to it, ad performance worsened. Even the FT, a clear leader in the digital transition, just reported flat revenues for the first half of the year.
• Invest in growth initiatives that will finally provide dependable revenue and profit growth — if the companies can hit the zero benchmark in their core businesses...

...

The seven-day print daily is going away.

The New York Times itself is down 6.3 percent in daily circulation and 1.7 percent on Sunday, both numbers getting worse from the first quarter. Its all-access strategy has strengthened the Sunday print paper, but now even that apparently can’t do enough to keep it from declining. The accelerating print decline, of course, is the main driver of the massive Advance paper cutting. More importantly, we can see almost all big dailies emphasizing Sunday and weekender print/digital packages, as seven-day print home delivery becomes obsolescent....

• http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/08/the-newsonomics-of-the-new-york-times-running-in-place/