The historic election of Barack Obama gave the New York Times a US$1.7-million injection of revenue at a time of sharply declining advertising sales.
The day after the election, newsstands from Seattle to New York sold out of the Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune and other papers declaring Obama the first black president in the United States. Some jubilant customers grabbed multiple copies as keepsakes.
The Times restarted its printing presses twice to generate an additional 350,000 copies of the Nov. 5 edition. Customers lined up outside the Times’ Manhattan headquarters to buy one, and the paper even set up a temporary newsstand inside its TimesCenter auditorium.
The newspaper also sold that edition online with a resealable plastic envelope for $14.95—well above its normal $1.50 single-copy price—and the newspaper sold framed front page of the Times, Obama photographs and other items, said spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.
All that amounted to $1.7 million in sales last month, said Janet Robinson, chief executive of The New York Times Co.
But Robinson recognized the sales as a one-time reprieve for an industry beseiged by falling revenue as the deepening recession puts further pressure on an ad market already suffering from the migration of readers to the Internet.
Nonetheless, “we do think these sales speak to the enduring value of newspapers in all their formats as the preferred providers of trusted news and information,” she said at a UBS media conference Tuesday.
Ad revenue at the Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers owned by the Times company fell 17% in October compared with the same month last year. Last month, the Times company slashed its quarterly dividend by 74% to conserve cash.
The company also said Tuesday it was in talks with lenders about debt payments due in the next two years and planned to borrow up to $225 million against the value of its Manhattan headquarters.
