Newspaper Industry Decline, New York Times | featured news

New York Times profit tripled in the fourth quarter thanks to one-time items, including the sale of its share in Indeed.com, but the underlying business continued to erode on sharp advertising declines.

In a deteriorating advertising climate, the company said it would seek to eliminate roughly 50 jobs through attrition and buyouts.

The New York Times rolled out a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 a month in a bet that readers would pay for news they have grown accustomed to getting free.

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for access.

According to internal sources, the New York Times may soon be charging users for its online content. In a move that would bring the publication parallel to the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Financial Times, the New York Times seems to have settled on a system that would allow online readers to sample a certain amount of content before being prompted to subscribe.

USA Today suffered a steep drop, losing the top spot in weekday circulation for the first time since the 1990s to The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times’ weekday circulation fell 7.3 percent.

The paper's owner, New York Times Co., has threatened to shut it down unless its unions make $20 million in concessions.

A five-part Los Angeles Times series on the futility of government efforts to quell the growing threat of wildfires won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, and the New York Times claimed five of journalism's highest awards in a year that recognized the watchdog function of the press even as newspapers struggle to survive.

New York Times reported a lower fourth-quarter profit as an advertising slump continues to erode its capital base. The publisher's revenue fell 11%.