The New York Times has done a lot in its online division, in terms of offering content for free, leaning towards more supplemental income from advertising, and integrating with social networks like Facebook in order to further engage segmented audiences. Nevertheless, after years of fighting the printed industry trend and even a recent hiring freeze, The New York Times will be eliminating about 100 newsroom jobs over the course of this year, according to an article in The New York Times today.

Considering some of the staff cuts we've seen from others that participate in online markets in recent months, like AOL, Yahoo, EMI and iVillage, the percentage of those that will be eliminated from The New York Times is relatively small, given that The Times has over 1,300 employees that work in the newsroom. And as all companies look to do, The Times will try to avoid layoffs by not refilling positions that have become vacant, and by offering buyouts to others.

Regardless of these efforts, layoffs are probably the inevitable ending to this particular chapter for The New York Times. What makes this particularly difficult for The Times is the paper's necessity to compete in a struggling market. The examples given by the cited article in The New York Times today outlines the strain of dealing with The Wall Street Journal, which is ramping up its efforts to compete directly with The Times, as well as the expensive coverage of the war in Iraq and the ongoing presidential elections.

What one would gather from reading this article in The New York Times is that the newspaper company is finding a hard time lowering its operational costs, which would be a necessity to fully adapt to the changing distribution and advertising methods found in the online sector. I'll be the first to admit that shifting gears, from printed to digital, and then onto free, is no easy task, and there are a lot of growing pains. The Times will need to continue to change a lot within the company structure in order to remain the longstanding powerhouse it is.

As Murdoch had been mulling over making The Wall Street Journal free online, it has been clear for a few months now that he'd been taking cues from The Times' experience when making his decision to keep The Journal a subscription-based service. What's next for printed media?