The New York Times is setting up a small team in Sydney to create local stories it hopes will encourage Australians to subscribe and engage with the Times' global network.
The team will be spearheaded by one of its journalists, Damien Cave, who says its website already has a strong reader and subscriber base here.
"This, for us, is an experiment in terms of both audience and journalism," Mr Cave told Fairfax Media.
"What we are doing here is actually pretty unique ... We may or may not partner with some people along the way. This for us is a pretty ambitious start-up model that is different than anything we have done before."
Mr Cave would not reveal the exact number of Australian subscribers but, according to the latest financial reports, 59 per cent of New York Times' revenue in the first nine months of 2016 came from circulation, up from 56 per cent in 2015.
It has 1.5 million digital subscribers, of which 225,000 subscribe only to its popular crossword. Its circulation revenues are increasing at about 3 per cent a quarter, while advertising revenues are falling at about 7 per cent a quarter.
"We are at core, especially more and more, a subscriber business," Mr Cave explained.
During the 2016 US election, metropolis papers such as The New York Times were accused of ignoring working class and regional issues, which isolated large pockets of the population. It has a tense relationship with the new US President, and repeatedly writes articles accusing Donald Trump of lying.
Mr Cave said his team would look for stories outside of Sydney and at the edges of cities, but noted Australia was largely an urban country.
"We are interested in every Australian who wants to know about the world and wants to engage with our journalism. The New York Times has a reputation for being – depending on who you talk to – snobby and elite or sophisticated and cosmopolitan ... [but] we are not here just for a small slice of the population."
Mr Cave is advertising for several positions and the team is likely to work out of a co-working space, possibly in Surry Hills, until it finds a permanent office.
There was interest from advertisers, he said, but they had not yet engaged any advertising staff.
It had also not yet decided if it would create a front page for Australian readers, as The Guardian does, or create a sub-page within the Times' site. But it would start sending out a daily and weekly newsletter edited for Australians.
