The Incredible Shrinking New York Times

The trouble with being a national institution is that when you start going down the tubes the whole nation is there to gawk at your agony. 

And if you are The New York Times the whole blogosphere is goggling at you in its pajamas.  

The blogosphere is full of experts, as Dan Rather could tell you. Thomas Lifson is not just proprietor of The American Thinker but also a management consultant.  So he has the expertise to translate the NYT earnings numbers into dollars and sense.  He observes that recently NYT CEO

Janet Robinson told investors at a Newspaper Association of America conference in New York that the company would be raising the price of single copy newspapers and home delivery subscriptions. At the same time, the company has suddenly accelerated and apparently made more drastic a previously-announced plan to shrink the physical size of the paper and cut the amount of news provided to readers.

So, Lifson tells his readers, here is what is going down.

[T]he company is composed of a large newspaper business decaying faster and faster, slightly offset by a medium-sized, nicely-but-not-spectacularly-growing internet publishing business, and a half interest in a Manhattan skyscraper under construction.

Of course there’s nothing actually wrong with a nice, medium-sized internet business.  In fact, life can be much more fun on a zippy frigate that on a ponderous ship-of-the-line.

The thing is that when it comes to invitations to important competitive social events, it helps to be the captain of a ship-of-the-line.  It helps with the ladies, too.