Brother, can you spare a 'Times'?
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Speaking (as I just did) of the dead-tree industry and its use of red ink, the Gray Lady is hemorrhaging all over the place.
Despite the sometimes undeserved respect its name conjures up in the brains of readers, sources, and undeservedly respected CEOs, you'd have to say that the New York Times has been mismanaged — especially because of its built-in advantage over the rest of us scribes.
Still a powerhouse in so many areas that it's often a target of parodies (like the one above), the paper is becoming a self-parody in the financial world. Not as a news source, but as a corporation.
As the Financial Times (U.K.) reports:
Here's a longish excerpt from the NYT's own version:
The industry's troubles steadily worsened through 2007 and 2008. The Times Company's overall revenue last year fell 7.7 percent, and its newspaper ad revenue dropped 14.2 percent.
In November, the company cut the dividend to 6 cents, the lowest it had been since the 1980s.
Cash flow remains positive, but it is shrinking, and the company faces significant debt payments over the next 13 months, so it has taken several steps to raise cash. The company is seeking a sale-leaseback of a portion of its headquarters building, it is trying to sell its investment in the Boston Red Sox and it recently borrowed $250 million from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, an investor in the company.
The company has a two-class stock structure, with the majority of the supervoting shares held by a trust for [chairman Arthur] Sulzberger's extended family. For members of the family, the dividend has been a major source of income.
This isn't the first time that the paper has faced financial hard times. It was only a little more than a century ago that Adolph Ochs, a printer and publisher in Tennessee, purchased the ailing paper.
Considering the mess his descendants have made of the paper of record, the old man (as he lies moldering) might well be wondering why the hell he left Chattanooga in the first place.
Not that the rest of us in the newspaper industry are exactly chortling. Yes, the Times looks as if it has been mishandled by the Ochs/Sulzberger clan. But if the country's best-known paper (and one with a huge staff of skilled whiners, domestic and foreign) can be in this much trouble, what does this say about the industry?
Incidentally, I mean "whiners" as a complimentary term for "reporters."
Back to business: Obituaries for dead newspapers may soon be available only on the web if the living and breathing owners of media properties don't figure something out but quick.
