More bad news for newspapers

It costs the New York Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle. According to the Times, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and US$148 million on wages and benefits. Wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about US$200 million per year. After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that US$200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times’s delivery costs would be US$644 million per year. The Kindle retails for US$359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: “We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.” Multiply those numbers together and you get US$297 million—a little less than half as much as US$644 million. Actually, things could be worse: a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells Business Insider that it’s “so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.”

The Business Insider