“As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”
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.”