The New York Times has announced plans to cut 100 newsroom jobs and close down a high-profile opinion app that has failed to attract readers in the three months since its launch.

In a note to staff on Wednesday, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said: “The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of the New York Times, but we know that they will be painful for the individuals affected and for their colleagues.”

The news organisation will also cut a smaller number of jobs in its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and moving to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily.

The current number of employees in the Times’ newsroom is 1,330, up from 1,189 in 2011. The 100 positions comprise about 7.5% of the newsroom staff. “We are reducing the cost base of the company to safeguard the long-term profitability of the Times, not because of any short-term business difficulties,” Sulzberger and Thompson said.

The pair said they would “sunset” NYT Opinion, a standalone subscription app launched in June that offered readers access to op-eds, blogs and editorials on the Times website for $6 a month. Sulzberger and Thompson said it has attracted “early passionate loyalists” but “it hasn’t attracted the kind of new audience it would need to be truly scalable”.

They praised NYT Now, an app aimed at younger readers that charges $8 for four weeks’ access but said that it too had not proved as popular as hoped. “NYT Now is a terrific app and has struck a chord with younger users, many of them entirely new to the Times. However, our effort to define and market a lower-priced subscription offer on the web and core apps has proven much less successful.”

The company’s latest app, NYT Cooking, is subscription free at present. The product had more than a million unique visitors two weeks after its launch on 17 September, Sulzberger and Thompson said.

Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, sent a separate note to the newsroom staff. “I will use this as an opportunity to seriously reconsider some of what we do – from the number of sections we produce to the amount we spend on freelance content,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve enjoyed different levels of success with different products. They are all experiments, which we are determined to treat as such: to learn, pivot and, where necessary, make prompt decisions about them,” Sulzberger and Thompson said. “We believe that this process of exploration and experimentation is essential to future growth at the New York Times and we will continue to support and fund it.”