'NY Times' CFO: Most Job Cuts Are Behind Us

Semi-relax, New York Times employees! Having lasted this long, your job isn't going away. Probably.

"I believe right now a good part of our severance is behind us," said Times Co. CFO Jim Follo on this morning's first-quarter earnings call when asked about what sort of severance costs he expects to encounter in the remainder of 2009.

"It is a hard number to be very precise on," he temporized. But, he said, "we feel highly confident we won't come anywhere close to what we did last year," when the company incurred $80 million in severance-related expenses. All told, the company's headcount was down 15.5 percent at the end of March versus a year earlier.

Earlier in the call, Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson discussed, albeit not in much depth, the company's efforts to find ways other than advertising to monetize its content online. Robinson said the Times Co. recently analyzed the business models of more than 30 other news organizations to see which were getting the most revenue out of their digital operations.

"What we have learned is that the advertising model we have used at nytimes.com has generated more revenue than the vast majority of other organizations, including some that are much larger than our site," she said. Translation: We haven't figured it out, but at least no one else has, either. "We continue to explore payment models as well as other approaches," she added.