The New York Times.

From BBC to NYT.

A new boss for an old paper.

THE New York Times Company, an American newspaper group, has a history of ill-fated acquisitions, such as About.com, a loss-making online information service it bought in 2005 and may soon offload. On August 14th the company appointed Mark Thompson, the departing director-general of the BBC, a British public broadcaster, as its new boss. Will Mr Thompson be another acquisition that the company will regret?

Arthur Sulzberger, the paper's hands-on publisher and chairman, is hoping that Mr Thompson can help to rescue the Grey Lady, which has swooned because of falling print circulation and advertising revenues. Janet Robinson, chief executive since 2004, abruptly resigned last December; she had risen up through the ranks of the advertising division.

Expertise of that sort is passe: newspapers can no longer rely on big cheques from advertisers to sustain them. Mr Thompson, the thinking goes, can help to boost revenues by attracting a more global audience and experimenting with new platforms. Under his leadership, the BBC launched innovative tools, such as the iPlayer, a popular online television and radio service.

But Mr Thompson is an odd choice to lead a big, struggling private company. One analyst uncharitably compares his appointment to hiring the boss of a big charity to do a corporate turnaround. Mr Thompson has spent most of his career in public-service broadcasting at the BBC, save for a few years as boss of Britain's Channel 4 television, a commercial broadcaster. The BBC is state-backed, and owes its survival to a tax on every household in Britain with a television set. That tax brought in ￡3.6 billion ($5.8 billion) last year.

The New York Times, by contrast, needs to make money to survive. The fundamental challenge facing newspapers, says Mark Oliver of Oliver & Ohlbaum Associates, a consultancy, is how to get readers to pay for news online. At the BBC Mr Thompson did not have to worry about that.

He will have to start. Recently the New York Times found some success getting more online readers to fork out. Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers' fleeing subscribers.

He will also have to confront Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, who has tried to lure away some of the New York Times's subscribers and advertisers by bulking up the Wall Street Journal's general coverage and its news about New York in particular. Mr Thompson may relish the fight: as boss of the BBC, he publicly criticised Mr Murdoch's (unsubsidised) British television network for threatening to "dwarf" its rivals. So he will fit right in with the Manhattan media set. But complaining about Mr Murdoch is not the same thing as beating him.