NYT.com And IHT.com Likely To Merge

If New York Times Co. executives have their way, even more people may soon be checking out The New York Times' photo essays, such a Moises Saman's new one documenting life in three Iraqi cities. On Monday, executives at The New York Times and International Herald Tribune revealed plans to merge the papers' Web sites and launch a "co-branded international home page" that would replace iht.com. Although the discussion is merely a proposal at this point, the merger conversation—along with talk about redesigning the IHT's print edition—has been underway for several months.

"[T]he reason [we want to merge the two sites] is that we believe that it will provide us with much more scale and will expose our journalism to a much larger audience," IHT publisher Stephen Dunbar-Johnson told The New York Times' Doreen Carvajal. "In terms of driving revenues from advertising, it will be a much more powerful proposition."