NY Times may dump print version within five years

This news from Ha'aretz is pretty astounding:

Will we print the NY Times in five years? I don't care," says the NY Times publisher

Despite his personal fortune and impressive lineage, Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the most respected newspaper in the world, is a stressed man.

Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years now, and the Times company's market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted to a loss of $570 million because of writeoffs and losses at the Boston Globe.

As if that weren't enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.

All this may explain why Sulzberger does not talk with the press.

But perhaps the rarified Alpine air at the World Economic Forum at Davos relaxes the CEOs of the world's leading companies, and what began as a casual chat ended in a fascinating glimpse into Sulzberger's world and how he sees the future of the news business.

Arthur Sulzberger - Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years? "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either," he says. He's looking at how best to manage the transition from print to Internet.

"Internet is a wonderful place to be and we're leading there," he adds. The Times has doubled its online readership, and now has 1.1 million subscribing to the print edition - and 1.5 million readers online, each day.

The New York Times is on a journey, Sulzberger says, and its end will be the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will be the end of the transition.

If they do dump the print edition, I hope they develop a better way to navigate around the paper than their current web edition offers. It's very hard to scan the website the way I scan the print edition.