Years ago, for an ex-pat living in Europe, reading the International Herald Tribune was a cozy part of one's life away, a catchup on the doings back home and a way to stay in touch with what America was thinking on everything from politics to baseball.
That's still true today, but more and more the focus of the IHT is on the world out there: Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.
If the paper was seen as a sleeping giant under the joint ownership of The Washington Post and The New York Times, it's now very much a rising giant since the Times assumed full ownership in late 2002.
In the time since, the Times has worked to transform the IHT into an international edition of the paper, as its face beyond U.S. shores.
“The International Herald Tribune name is a brand that has developed over 120 years and means a lot to our readers," says Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of the IHT. "But we want to be very clear about what we are, which is the global edition of the New York Times.”
Two months ago, making it all very formal, the IHT sprouted a new masthead, adding “The global edition of the New York Times” below the IHT name.
What's behind all this is a push by the Times to position itself as a major global player in what's shaping up as a three-way race that pits the Times against the UK's Financial Times and Rupert Murdoch's newspaper holdings, which now include The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London.
The changes at the IHT began shortly after the Times took full control. In 2003 and 2004, the IHT added new printing sites, increased pagination, added color and beefed up staffing. Recently it launched an international edition of KEY, a New York Times real estate magazine.
But critical to the Times-IHT strategy is building up the IHT web site, which is free, making it more and more competitive with the pay sites of the Journal and the FT.
It's online where the much of the battle for global position will play out.
"I believe that there is a growing community of people around the world that want international news content, a high-quality, concise resume to make sense of world," says Dunbar-Johnson. "I think that community is growing and advertisers increasingly want to reach them."
The IHT site is picking up more stories from the Times, and eventually the aim is to merge the two sites into one truly global news operation, but each with its own cover page and section fronts for things like sports, business and lifestyle.
"Merging the sites would enable us to have the vast digital scale and resources of the New York Times operation," says Dunbar-Johnson. "We could work closely with IHT and New York Times editors around the world to provide more interactivity and faster news to the web, while maintaining the news judgment of the IHT, which is critical."
In addition to building readership, the strategy will benefit advertisers, he says. "They get a bigger site, a better site and more users, more interactivity opportunities, more video, fresher news, more reasons to buy--just what an advertiser wants."
The current IHT site has about 7 million international unique readers, compared to the 10 million The New York Times has. Overall theTimes reports having 51.1 million unique visitors in May.
The one factor that's not playing a role in the IHT strategy, says Dunbar-Johnson, is Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones at the end of last year. The IHT's game plan was well in place before that happened, and he doesn't see it changing things.
“We are not reactive to Dow Jones. We are much more focused on what we need to do than on what Dow Jones might do,” says Dunbar-Johnson.
He says the international market is not now suddenly more competitive because of the Dow Jones deal.
"It has always been competitive," he says. "We are all intensely competitive and all trying to evolve as the market has evolved. The only thing that has changed is that the pace of change has quickened. We are all just running faster."
