New York Times Reviews

Pros

Everyone you meet thinks it is awesome that you work there and that you are incredibly lucky. This will maybe make it easier to find another job.

Cons

It is not as awesome as everyone else thinks. It is no different than any other mid-size to large newspaper.

Advice to Senior Management

Some of the people in charge at The Times are the smartest people you will ever meet. For the most part, they accommodate workers.

Pros

Really smart people. Interesting work. New building, modern setting. New ideas bouncing around all the time.

Cons

There's a lot of pressure to work a lot, it ends up like a competition to see who can stay the latest or get more done (even in off hours).
Promotion makes sense in some cases, but in other cases it seems like luck or favoritism.

Advice to Senior Management

Should try harder to retain talent.

Pros

Designer office, clean, organized, subsidized cafeteria, great supplies and staff structure, work/ life balance.

Cons

Career advancement is hard to come by. It's hard to get fired at The Times - they prefer to move people around, so you'll find incompetent, comfortable folks falling through the cracks. Heavy politics.

Pros

Prestige, cafeteria, free newspapers, lovely building. Management very easy going, almost too lax. Sort of like nero fiddling while Rome burning

Cons

Slow moving, still stuck in the past. Wish they would be more forward thinking and embrace technology. Stop keeping everything so inside.

Advice to Senior Management

get with the times. Promote from within. Pay your staff comparable. I'm leaving for greener pastures since your salaries are so behind the times

Pros

The climate in Wilmington is wonderful as are the people in the community.The newsroom is mostly made up of transplants who thought they would stay for a couple years and move on to a bigger paper but never left.

Cons

The newspaper industry is the root of the problem here. It is nearing extinction and corporate is bleeding every penny out of the smaller papers in the chain to help the Old Gray Lady survive.

Advice to Senior Management

Get over yourselves and realize that you will not survive the death of print media by updating the website 20 times a day with poorly written stories that the staff has not been given the time to work on.

Pros

Great environment, smart, friendly people

Cons

I'm a contractor. I would like to become full time.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire me full time

Pros

Best thing about working for the New York Times is being able to put it on your resume. The training I received was excellent.

Cons

The hardest part about working for the New York Times was the fact that opportunities to move up and to increase my salary seemed limited at best.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to the leadership at New York Times is to offer more realistic opportunities for advancement within the company. My work was exemplary, yet I could tell early on that my opportunities for advancement were limited.

Pros

Great paper. Not afraid to spend money to cover a story. Great journalists. Very creative people, for the most part. A generally convivial atmosphere and spirit of teamwork. Everyone generally takes great pride in tthe paper.

Cons

A few bad apples, but that's true anywhere. An increasingly heavy emphasis on the digital side, which I realize is necessary to keep the paper economically viable but which also puts much more pressure on staff editors and, I'm sure, reporters, with no increase in salary and, in fact, a decrease these last few years in the number of employees. Often, not as much time for copy editors to work on a story as was once the case, partly because of so many extra tasks related to the Web site.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure that the young digital staff you are hiring are more skilled in editing, to take some of the burden off editors trying to put out the traditional print editions.

Pros

Work with super smart people with lots of career opportunity

Cons

Not much access to newsroom

Pros

some groups (e.g. digital) are great at encouraging developers to try new things in our spare time (e.g. prototypes of new technologies). It's not an "enterprise-y" culture, i.e. we're free to use open source tools like mongodb, memcache, etc.

Cons

Some groups (e.g. corporate IT) are stuck in 1985. It can be incredibly frustrating dealing with some "Application Specialist" whose primary job skill is restarting a Lotus Notes server.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep things digital-focused, but don't jump on any trendy bandwagons. You don't need twitter accounts.