NY Times puts its global stamp on the Trib
(02-26 09:18)
For a decade the International Herald Tribune has been the global edition of the New York Times in all but name. Yesterday, the parent company made it official.
In a statement, the New York Times Company said the 125-year-old offshoot of the defunct New York Herald Tribune will be re-christened sometime this fall as the International New York Times, AFP reports.
“The digital revolution has turned the New York Times from being a great American newspaper to becoming one of the world's best-known news providers,’’ said New York Times Company chief executive Mark Thompson. “We want to exploit that opportunity,'' said the former BBC boss, adding that a new website for international readers is also in the pipeline.
The International Herald Tribune was co-owned by the New York Times and the Washington Post from 1967 until 2003, when the Times became its sole proprietor and restyled it as “the global edition of the New York Times.’’
Sold in more than 160 countries and territories, the IHT has a daily circulation of more than 226,000, an IHT spokeswoman told AFP by email. Before 1967 the IHT was known as the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune – immortalized in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave classic `Breathless by Jean Seberg in a tight yellow T-shirt hawking copies on the Champs-Elysees.
The New York Times published an international edition under its own name from 1946 until it bought into ‘the Trib’ and helped oversee its development as a global media brand through the use of satellite printing plants.
“I have to say I'm sorry to see the Herald Tribune go,’’ said Charles Robertson, author of The International Herald Tribune: The First 100 Years and an IHT reader since his childhood in Switzerland.
“I suppose, once the Times pushed out the Washington Post, it was probably inevitable,’’ Robertson, a professor emeritus at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, told AFP.
News of the rebranding came less than three weeks after the New York Times Company posted a 2012 group profit of US$133 million, compared with a loss of US$39.7 million in 2011.
It gave no breakdown of profit or loss figures for its newspapers, but earlier this month it said it was putting the Boston Globe and other New England assets up for sale to focus on its eponymous core product.
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