On Monday, Phillip Alder, The Times’s bridge columnist, announced that the column had come to an end. (So did his Times subscription, according to The New York Observer.)
Of the 2,500 who wrote to my office, one reader, Lee Traub, called the demise of the bridge column “another diminishment of daily pleasures,” adding that “Mondays, Thursday and Saturdays will never be the same again.”
Chuck Ettelson of St. Louis expressed a similar sentiment. He said he understood that times are tough but “having content is one way to retain readers.”
Anne and Robert Schumacher of Manhattan put it this way:
We were disheartened, discouraged and taken aback when we opened the New York Times yesterday morning and read Phillip Alder’s announcement about the demise of his bridge column. This can’t be much of a cost saving measure, as so many other eliminations must have been, such as the weekly TV supplement, the stock pages, Home section and the Friday movie clock. Soon, the obits will disappear, and we won’t even know if we’re alive or dead.
Now we realize that much information can be obtained from the many web sites on the Internet, but this well written, very informative and influential column is unique and not available elsewhere. We hope and assume you will be deluged with correspondence similar to ours and will pass it along to the powers that be — who perhaps will reconsider this decision.
I also heard from many readers who were upset by the recent discontinuation of the Friday movie-schedule listings, known as the “movie clock.” The movie clock was published for the last time earlier this month.
One seven-day print subscriber, Janet Indick, described herself as “lost without that movie schedule.” She asked for its replacement, noting “It is hard for seniors who do not use computers or smart phones for everything to obtain the information about the movies playing in their areas.” She said that her neighbor feels the same way.
Carlos Gutierrez-Solana wrote to say that “as more and more sections of interest to your home delivery customers are disappearing, sometimes without advance warning, there will be fewer and fewer reasons to maintain a subscription to the New York Times.” He added, “I believe that it is wrong to assume that everyone wants everything online.” He, too, described himself as “a longtime, seven-day, home-delivery customer.”
I spoke on Tuesday to the culture editor, Danielle Mattoon, who had some tough decisions to make when she was told a few months ago to cut nearly 20 percent of her nonpersonnel budget. (Features such as the movie listings and the bridge column come under the culture heading.)
Faced with having to cut close to half a million dollars from her annual budget, Ms. Mattoon also was dealing with another financial angle. In last year’s buyouts and layoffs of newsroom staff, she lost a number of staff positions — a net loss of four from a base of 56. (More than four left, and there have been a few hires.) This meant more pressure to rely on freelance staff, who are paid from the nonpersonnel budget.
“We have fewer culture writers and enormous demands on them,” particularly because of new digital efforts, she told me. In order to preserve as much of the freelance budget as possible to help generate the kind of criticism and coverage she finds most valuable, she decided to cut some features.
The bridge column, she said, wasn’t a huge expense but it is particularly time-consuming for the copy desk to edit, since “you have to play the game in order to check it and make sure it’s right.”
As for the movie listings, they were a significant expense. Eliminating them from the print edition helped her to keep the freelance budget as strong as possible, she said. (Readers can still see what movies are playing in their area by going to The Times’s Movies page.)
All of this comes in the context of The Times reinventing itself from mostly a print newspaper to mostly a digital news and information company. It’s a very tricky transition since most revenue still comes from print but the future is certainly digital. I wrote about it in a recent Sunday Review column, and in a follow-up post. And I wrote about the ending of the Home section recently, too.
Will the features be back by popular demand? Ms. Mattoon can’t offer that hope to readers. Nor is it very likely that The Times has seen the end of budget cuts as it deals with the decline of print advertising revenue.
“It’s regrettable,” Ms. Mattoon said. “We would like to keep everything. We know that these features provide a service and a connection to the paper, and that things like the bridge column speak uniquely to a certain audience.”
I can’t argue with Ms. Mattoon’s decisions, which seem to have been carefully, even agonizingly, considered.
There are no good choices here, and I agree with her that The Times’s exclusive journalism — the work of its critics and reporters and those who support and edit their work — must be the top priority. But I’m also sympathetic with those longtime readers, who might reasonably feel that their concerns have slipped down the priority list.