• PaidContent, Thursday, May 5, 2011 2 PM

The common industry assumption that the New York Times Co. wants 300,000 digital subscribers over the next year is "inaccurate," Times digital head Martin Nisenholtz said in a recent interview.  "I don't know where that number came from." 

Actually, the figure first appeared in a highly reputable source that often serves as the basis for news that shows up all over the place -- the pages of The New York Times. Staci Kramer, reporting in PaidContent, takes care to point out that Niesenholtz knew that fact, and that his comment referred to the "company executives" who "privately" gave the 300,000 figure to reporter Jeremy Peters.

The upshot? "It means that there is no real way to gauge the more than 100,000 subscribers the NYT said it got in the first three weeks of the paywall in the context of a goal," Kramer writes. "We don't know if the company is one third of the way there for the first year, one half, etc."

 

Read the whole story at PaidContent »