“WALTER DURANTY IS ROLLING OVER IN HIS GRAVE:” The New York Times, which 80 years ago hid the results of Stalin’s terror famine is now getting into the food delivery business, Bloomberg reports:
This summer, the New York Times will begin selling ingredients for recipes from its NYT Cooking website as the newspaper publisher seeks new revenue sources to offset declines in print. The Times is partnering with meal-delivery startup Chef’d, which will send the ingredients to readers within 48 hours. The Times and Chef’d will split sales from the venture.
“Our audience spends a lot of time cooking at home,” said Alice Ting, vice president of brand development, licensing and syndication for the Times. “So for us it was a natural area to investigate.”
The Times’ foray into meal delivery is another example of how the publisher is looking for new ways to make money from its content, brand and journalists to hedge against the uncertain future of newspapers. Last year, circulation and advertising accounted for about 94 percent of total revenue.
In recent years, New York Times Co. has started businesses around live conferences, a wine club and an online store that sells hats, shirts and other trinkets with Times logos. The paper also runs a growing travel unit, “Times Journeys,” in which tourists pay thousands of dollars to see countries like Iran or Cuba, many of which are led by Times foreign correspondents.
In 2013, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the free-falling Washington Post out of seat cushion money. But “In New York, Scrappy Local Newspaper Struggling For Survival,” to slightly modify a decade-old Iowahawk headline, is diversifying out of fear.
It’s a well-deserved fear, given the horrendous quality of their core product, which — I think! — is still virtue signaling leftwing opinion branded as news, right?
Speaking of which, after a couple of decades worth of articles decrying the “evils” of modern technology and hygiene, I hope whoever preps the Times’ meals washes his hands and has a working refrigerator.
Related: “What I Saw in Iran,” in which the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles takes a “Times Journey” over to the land of Khomeini.
(Headline via Todd Kincannon.)