Changing title is nothing new for the broadsheet. It began life as the Paris Herald in 1887, founded by the flamboyant American entrepreneur James Gordon Bennett jnr. The son of a tycoon, Bennett - the man behind the expression of incredulity, "Gordon Bennett!" - had exiled himself to Paris after falling into disgrace: he had arrived drunk at a party and urinated in a grand piano in front of New York society.
The Herald morphed in 1924 into the New York Herald Tribune and from 1967, into the International Herald Tribune, co-owned by the New York Times and Washington Post. In 2003, the Post pulled out, leaving the Times as sole owner.
With ad revenues and staff numbers under increasing pressure, the Trib was first restyled as the Times' "global edition". From today, the brand change will be complete and the IHT will be no more.
The task the Times faces with the "INYT" is hefty.
At present, the IHT has a printed distribution of around 224,000 copies, plus a handful of online subscribers through the Times website.
Just over half of its readership is in Europe where it competes toe-to-toe for the business executive market with the cyber-smart Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, which are moving to beef up their products.
Haski - whose news website is one of the rare success stories in French newspaper publishing - believes technology and marketing are the least of the INYT's problems.
"It's quite an audacious gamble wanting to become the first real global newspaper," Haski told the Herald. "But the Times has been innovating in the past few years, particularly on the digital scene."
More of a challenge, though, is content. If the new "international" product is simply a tweaked New York Times - if it is seen as parochial and predictable, shorn of articles that are curious, provocative, cosmopolitan and spicy, or analyses that give a purely US perspective - it may fail to win new readers and alienate the old ones.
"I would question whether the idea of a daily international newspaper works at all," Emily Bell, director of Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and former director of digital content at the Guardian news and media in London, told the Herald. "It still has some value ... but most international news brands attached originally to newspaper [eg] the Financial Times, the WSJ and Guardian - are tending to migrate away from daily paper."
New York Times' digital strategy boosts profits
Like newspapers everywhere, the New York Times is striving to move out of high-cost printing and into low-cost digital, replacing newspaper delivery and street-corner sale by access through iPad, phone and PC.
In March 2011, the Times moved behind a paywall, but left 10 articles free a month as a teaser. The strategy has been a hit. In August, it reported the combined NYT and International Herald Tribune website had 699,000 online subscribers, an increase of 35 per cent over a year earlier.
The company's operating profit rose 13 per cent over the previous 12 months to US$77.8 million ($93.5 million).
