Romensko's response to the Atlantic article

There was much reaction to last weeks Atlantic article that questioned the ongoing viability of the New York Times.

Over at Poynter there is a response from the paper's Jim Romenesko.

It is worth reading the whole piece but what Jim says is

We fully recognize that our industry is undergoing unprecedented change as technology alters the habits of our readers and advertisers. At the same time, the cyclical downturn in the U.S. economy has exacerbated advertising declines. But The New York Times Company is in a better position than many others in the newspaper industry because of the steps we have taken to improve our performance. In the last five years, we have focused on developing our digital properties and carefully reducing costs while continuing to provide our readers with great journalism both in print and online.

It is a standard response for the newspaper industry these days and goes into some detail about specific financial issues.

But he continues

We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years, a number that has increased by about a third over the past decade. They like reading the print edition and pay a substantial amount of money to do so

And I think that this is the point that we sometimes forget when we forecast the demise of the print model.There is a loyal readership.In the UK 10 million people a day still buy a daily national deciding that they prefer the dead tree version to the flickering screen