The New York Times is always eager
to try new products.
But it is giving up on one: The New York Times for Kids. The Times is dropping this monthly section, which focused on topics that children had
questions about after eight years of serving it up.
The six remaining staff members (down from 12) have relocated.
The section started auspiciously when a 13- year-old boy told Caitlin
Roper, then an editor at The New York Times Magazine, ‘You should have a story about slime.”
That was a new form of audience research, and the team worked hard to
make sure children’s voices were in it, sometimes under their own bylines.
“With the expertise of the newsroom’s journalists behind them, they covered the topics that
children had the most questions about, like homelessness, money and immigration, but also puberty, cake and, yes, slime,” writes Mark Wilson.
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Fast Company opined
that “the decision to kill a rare, analog piece of publishing — in an era when parents are looking for resources for their children to unplug—seems remarkably
short-sighted.”
Maybe it is. Both parents and kids will miss the wacky but informative monthly insert developed by Roper, early editor Amber Williams and design director Deb
Bishop.
Why is the Times doing this? The Times Magazine is “undergoing a digital redesign and expansion and is shifting its priorities in order to realize
this vision,” it says.
Oh, come on. That is not a good explanation. Can’t the Times keep it as a free-floating insert not connected to the magazine?
Last year, the Times restored its mini crossword puzzle to the section after it received an outpouring of emails criticizing its decision to pull it out.
Maybe that
type of protest will work again.