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Future of Times-CBS News poll is up in the air

The future of The New York Times–CBS News poll, one of America's oldest and most influential public opinion polls, is up in the air.

At issue is the departure, after the 2016 election, of the Times' remaining veteran pollsters who worked with CBS. Two of them, Megan Thee-Brenan and Dalia Sussman, recently took voluntary buyout packages and will leave the Times at the end of the year. Another, former polling director Marjorie Connelly, who had worked in the unit for more than 20 years, took a buyout in 2014. CBS has indicated privately, according to a source familiar with the matter, that it is only interested in working with experienced, traditional pollsters at the Times.

Sources said CBS and the Times have not had any formal conversations about dissolving the 41-year-old partnership, which was the first such collaboration between two major U.S. news organizations. But there is growing speculation that they will go their separate ways after the election.

Reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, CBS polling director Sarah Dutton did not have a comment. Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said, "We remain committed, as we have always been, to high quality public opinion research and it's something that is being considered as we work on envisioning our future newsroom."

With the surge in cell phone usage and the increasing obsolescence of landlines in recent years, telephone polls, which are considered more reliable than web-based polls, have become more costly and time-consuming to conduct. At the same time, newsroom budgets have come under pressure due to the digital-media transition that has disrupted newspapers and television networks alike.

Created in 1976, the NYT–CBS operation is considered one of the gold-standard media polls, along with two other TV-newspaper polling partnerships: The Washington Post-ABC News poll and The Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. Those three polls, along with CNN and Fox News, are the ones being used by the Commission on Presidential Debates to determine inclusion in the general election face-offs this fall.

The Times is under significant pressure to find cost savings and has also been conducting a strategic review of its newsroom. The polling unit has already seen changes over the past few years. It contracted out its call center in 2013 and had a short-lived merger with the Times' data-journalism operation, The Upshot, that didn't work out due to friction between the two teams.

In 2014, as POLITICO reported at the time, The American Association for Public Opinion Research criticized the Times and CBS for an Internet-based poll, the results of which were featured on The Upshot and CBS's "Face the Nation."

The first joint Times-CBS poll was conducted in 1975, about attitudes toward President Ford’s response to New York City's possible bankruptcy. The latest, from July, found that "voters are grudgingly rallying around the nominees while expressing broad misgivings about the candidates," as the Times reported.

—Steven Shepard contributed to this report.