2007 | Honey, I Shrunk The Times

Times Insider shares historical insights from The New York Times. In this piece, David W. Dunlap, a Metro reporter, looks back at the history of The Times’s page width.

What’s all this about The New York Times getting smaller and smaller?

We’re the same size now — 12 inches across — that we’ve been since 2007. That was when a half century of shrinkage came to an end. At least for the time being.

In the mid-19th century, The Times was a truly broad “broadsheet,” with pages 18 inches across.

By the mid-20th century, it was still respectably broad. The Times was printed, four pages abreast, on webs of newsprint 64 inches wide, yielding individual pages 16 inches across — or 32 inches for a two-page spread, if you opened up the sheet for the purpose of puppy training.

The Times gobbled newsprint ravenously. It was an expensive habit. One big issue of the Sunday paper in the early 1950s might consume 2,500 tons of newsprint. And in 1953, paper manufacturers jacked up their price $10 a ton, leaving us with an annual newsprint bill of $21.7 million. That would be about $192.2 million in today’s dollars. Something had to be done.

On Dec. 28, 1953, The Times reduced the width of its web to 62 inches. That meant pages shrank to 15½ inches across, a reduction little noted at the time — except, perhaps, by puppies.

The next cut came on Valentine’s Day 1955, when the pages were reduced to a width of 15 inches. Years later, they shrank to 14½ inches, then again to 13½ inches, where they stayed until Aug. 6, 2007, when they slimmed down noticeably to 12 inches. (At some printing plants around the country at which the national edition is produced, a 46-inch web is used, so readers see a New York Times that is only 11½ inches wide.)

“A narrower paper is in some ways more reader-friendly,” the executive editor, Bill Keller, told the staff before the change was made. “It’s easier to handle. It will also be, by the time we introduce it, what readers expect in a newspaper.” That was, he said, because most of America’s principal broadsheets (as opposed to tabloids) were changing to the 12-inch page.

Mr. Keller acknowledged that stories would get a bit shorter as a result.

“The net loss of news space is approximately 5 percent, which I believe we can absorb without significant damage to the report,” he wrote. “We will look for ways to report incremental news developments in digests or other abbreviated forms, and to police flabby or redundant prose in longer pieces. I’m convinced that, with good editors and a little time, I could take 5 percent out of any day’s paper and actually make it better.”

The Times said it would save about $10 million a year on newsprint costs by narrowing the web.

Of course, the overall diminution of the newspaper in size and circulation has led to savings in paper consumption. The Times used only 104,000 metric tons of newsprint last year, down from 347,000 metric tons in 2000.

As a hedge against the volatility of prices, The Times has long invested in paper companies. It is currently the minority owner — through a company called Donohue Malbaie — of papermaking machinery at the Resolute Forest Company plant in Clermont, Quebec, which produced 218,000 metric tons of newsprint in 2015. The Times bought about 10 percent of that output.

The Times said in its 2015 annual report that a $10-a-ton price increase for newsprint would mean a $1 million additional expense for the company, “but would also result in improved performance in this joint venture investment.” Bad news, for once, would be kind of good.