International Herald Tribune rebrands under NYT

The venerable but dated brand of the International Herald Tribune will be dropped and the paper re-christened as the International New York Times. “The digital revolution has turned The New York Times from being a great American newspaper to becoming one of the world’s best-known news providers. We want to exploit that opportunity,” said Mark Thompson, president and CEO of the New York Times Company. From the NYT story:

A Times Company spokeswoman would not provide details on how the name change would affect the International Herald Tribune’s employees. Currently, half of the staff members who work in Paris are subject to French labor law, while Herald Tribune employees spread throughout the rest of the world are governed by local labor laws.

The masthead of the paper will also change, the spokeswoman said, but she declined to elaborate.

Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, publisher of The International Herald Tribune, noted that for most of the newspaper’s long history, it has had New York in its name. The paper was first published in 1887 as the European edition of The New York Herald. Through a series of ownership changes, it became The New York Herald Tribune in 1959.

The paper became The International Herald Tribune in 1967 when The Washington Post Company and the Times Company invested in the paper to keep it afloat after The New York Herald Tribune folded.