Somebody Resized My New York Times!

The New York Times is being downsized to USA Today proportions:

The New York Times is planning to reduce the size of the newspaper, making it narrower by one and a half inches, and to close its printing operation in Edison, N.J., company officials said yesterday.

The changes, to go into effect in April 2008, will be accompanied by a phased-in redesign of the paper and will mean the loss of 250 production-related jobs.

Several other American broadsheets reduced their size a few years ago, and many are planning further shrinkage to cut costs as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.

The Times, which made the announcement last night on the eve of its quarterly earnings report, said it would sublet its plant in Edison and consolidate its regional printing facilities at its newer plant in College Point, in Queens.

That consolidation will mean the loss of about a third of the total production work force of 800.

The Edison plant, which opened in 1992, is to keep printing papers until the spring of 2008, by which time one new press will have been added at College Point. That plant opened in 1997.

The company said the changes would save about $42 million a year — $30 million by consolidating printing at College Point and $12 million by reducing the size of the paper. Leaving the Edison plant means the company can avoid about $50 million in capital improvements there, although it will spend about $150 million to combine the facilities in College Point and buy a new press.

The reduction in the size of The Times will mean a loss of 5 percent of the space the paper devotes to news. If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.

“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,” Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.

Several broadsheets — including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post — have already reduced their size and others, like The Wall Street Journal, are planning to.

See also: New York Times Cut to 5 Percent Of Size; Keller Says Paper Better Without It (New York Observer’s Media Mob)