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Sunday, February 19, 2017

Yes, Trump is a Liar...

So let's look at the revenue at the NY Times (historical from 2000 through 2015 from the NY Times 10-K SEC filings at this site):


As you can see from a peak of around $3.5 billion (numbers on the left going up and down for those with a college education) in 2000 it has fallen to $1.5 Billion as of 2015 (years going from 2000 on the left to 2015 on the right).

WIRED magazine says (quoted from here): "Just days after the election, Trump suggested that the Times—or, per his preferred Twitter epithet, “the failing @nytimes”—would be a frequent target of his administration, calling an article “dishonest” for citing something he had said on CNN (which was odd, since he did actually say it, in public, on video) and adding (also falsely) that the Times “is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage.” In fact, it’s been the exact opposite: Four weeks after the election, Times chief executive Mark Thompson told an industry conference that subscriptions had surged at 10 times their usual rate."

They (WIRED) also shows this table:


What they don't seem to show is how dramatically the revenue has contracted (to less than 50% of its 2000 base) over the last fifteen years as well as how print is making up an ever larger percentage of that revenue.

Who uses print these days?

My mother used to - but she passed away several years ago.

What this really says is that the only, er, perhaps primarily the people from the generation prior to mine would still be using the NY Times (I was born in the nineteen fifties).  They are dying off.

It would appear that the boomers and that the Gen-X-Y-Z's are not picking up the slack.

Trump would appear to be saying (underline in quote above) that the Times has lost thousands of subscribers.

This is patently false.

Print subscribers in 2000 were (according the the 2000 10-K): 12-month average circulation: 1,132,400 Weekday. 1,697,300 Sunday.

In 2015 we find (from the 2015 10-K):  603,700 for weekday (Monday to Friday) and 1,127,200 for Sunday.

The NY Times in fact lost about a million subscribers during the week and a half million on Sunday.