According to the New York Post, the Gray Lady is losing hometown readers:

The New York Times lost almost 20 percent of its readers in the five boroughs between 2001 and 2004 as the paper pushed to reinvent itself as a national publication.
The Times’ daily circulation in New York City dropped 18.7 percent during that period, to 260,526 copies from 320,682, according to figures obtained by The Post and confirmed by the Times.
This means the Times’ readership in the five boroughs is roughly 28 percent of its overall circulation.

Why is this noteworthy? Because some critics (like former public editor Daniel Okrent) acknowledge that the paper leans to the left, but argue that this is only because the NY Times is writing for its hometown crowd of dark-blue Kerry voters. That’s a red herring. The NY Times is a liberal newspaper because publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., former executive editor Howell Raines and current managing editor Jill Abramson are all liberals and have made a tremendous impact on the tone of the paper’s political coverage over the last decade or so. It’s silly to call the Times “urban” (the term Sulzberger prefers, according to Okrent), just as it’s silly to call rap music “urban.” Why can’t we just call rap rap and the Times liberal?