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.