The New York Times closes City Room blog instead directing readers to its news site
The New York Times has announced it is to axe its NYC-centric City Room blogosphere admitting that the digital landscape has shifted since its launch in 2007.
Andy Newman, blog editor, acknowledged the decision to shutter the blog in a final post entitled ‘City Room, a Blog With a Broad Mandate, Is Retiring’.
At its peak, hosting a 80 bloggers on a separate publishing platform from the New York Time’s website, Newman said City Room was “creating a lot of extra work” for staff. Wendell Jamieson, Metro editor of The Times and a former City Room editor, said: “So City Room, per se, goes away.
“But all the benefits, all the sense of speed and fun and smarts - those will live on in new forms as we move through the digital, social age.”
Newman concluded that in 2007 when the platform was launched, City Room was often “the quickest way to get a story up".
He concluded: “We are not really dying: Our DNA has spread throughout the [NYT] newsroom.”
Now the New York Times operates around 20 active blogs.