The NYT has a circulation of 1,077,256. Delivery is anywhere from $3.35 per week to $6.70 per week depending on frequency of delivery. Obviously many people just buy single copies at newsstands. They employ 11,965 people including 350 staff writers.
How about this - fire everyone but the writers and a couple of great managers, sell all of the office space. Meet at Starbucks, if you need to, and organize everything over e-mail.
Do you know what those other 11,615 employees do? I don't, and this is just a stab in the dark, but I'm thinking you're as clueless as I am. I don't know how such an absurd statement gets modded up on a site like HN that tends to be geared for the entrepreneur types.
How exactly would firing 97% of the workforce help turn things around? Let's say you've got 350 writers and a couple great managers. Nevermind what your massive layoffs do for morale or company image. Who is going to publish what they write? Do you stay in the print business or do you take it online? Who prints it? Who is going to distribute it? Who puts it online? Who is going to do the investigation necessary to provide the writers with interesting things to write about? Who is going to market the business? How are you going to process payroll and handle day to day HR issues? Don't you also need a legal department? Afterall, you are writing stories about people and they may not always like what you write. You are going to have the occasional libel suit even if you have covered your bases. Oh, and who is going to run your email servers through which all of this will be organized?
Meet at Starbucks? Sheesh... This is the New York Times. They've been in business since 1851 and have received 98 Pulitzer Prizes. That's more than any other paper. In 1964 they took a case to the Supreme Court (Times v. Sullivan) which further established freedom of the press. In 1971 they successfully argued a Supreme Court case against the US government over a series of articles which revealed the expansion of the Vietnam War at the same time President Johnson was promising not to expand the war. There's no doubt they have some major problems, but this is a very prestigious organization you're talking about- not some crappy startup blog/amateur media outlet.
Your idea solves just about nothing and creates enormous problems. Running a newspaper, or any business for that matter, involves a lot more than you've taken into account.
