NEW YORK The New York Times plans to cut 250 jobs and shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them one-and-a-half inches narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday's edition. The newspaper's plans include closing a printing plant in Edison, N.J. The plant's workload will shift to another in New York City, the article said, estimating the moves would save the company $42 million per year. The job cuts account for about one-third of the Times' total production work force of 800, the newspaper said.With this said, it's very hard to find a groove. What used to be marketing ideas for paper that had a year or two to take hold now are only given a life span of about three months. Operation costs are enormous. I think the biggest challenge we have is learning the internet and taking newspaper people and teaching them about how to run on-line editions. Ours is nowhere near what it needs to be, but I'm learning. Blogging is one thing, putting things on-line is a different creature all together, but the good thing is that once you have systems in place in an on-line edition, you've won part of the battle. Think about it. I build a paper from scratch twice a week. In our online edition, it's a matter of cultivating and maintaining existing structures in the coding consistently adding copy. The thing is, and this is one of my battles, newspapers are a business. They have to make money to survive. Yes, you want the community to have a feeling of ownership, but the reality is we have to pay our bills too.
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