I’ll be spending the next few days in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., participating in the Next Newsroom conference, which is sponsored by the Knight Foundation.
I hope to blog live from the conference, something I’ve never done before. There also will be a live webstream on Thursday.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find someone who will support my idea of producing a short documentary on this crossroads that confronts newspaper journalists. We’re witnessing a historic shift on multiple levels, and the human dimension of this drama — journalists coping with the obliteration their jobs, profession and their role in a democracy itself — deserves to be told. Feel free to check out a 3-minute documentary I recently made about the demise of an old brewery here in Seattle: Go to my other blog, Viva Media!
Vanity Fair has published a story about The New York Times and speculation about the Sulzberger family being bullied into selling it. I haven’t had a chance to digest it fully, but a few sentences worth highlighting off the bat:
The New York Times Company is currently worth just a bit less than $2.8 billion, down from almost $7 billion in 2002. There’s little to indicate that the steady decline in its value will slow—it hasn’t implemented radical cost-cutting, made concerted efforts to shed underperforming assets, or proposed any new business strategies (save for its 12-year Internet effort).
The Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, is worth less than $2.8 billion??
It’s laughable but sadly true. By comparison, the nation’s largest garbage hauling and recycling company, Waste Management Inc., is valued today at over $17 billion.
Profit margins at the Times are low compared to other large papers, which Wall Street investors don’t like.
The Times itself, reporting on its recent decision (coming not long after Harbinger and Firebrand announced their directors slate) to cut 100 of its 1,332 news employees, points out that its newspaper operations had an 8 percent operating profit in 2007, while other, comparable papers had 13 to 22 percent margins. Reasonably, the Times share price might start to rise if it, too, could realize such levels of return. But those more profitable papers achieved their results by reducing newsroom personnel by, in some cases, more than 20 percent.
The Vanity Fair article closes with a chilling prediction: That the Times will be sold by the Sulzberger family. Warren Buffett, the Washington Post Co., Michael Bloomberg are trotted out as potential buyers. The highest bidder may win the day, Wolff writes.
The Sulzberger family has long assumed that its virtue and voting control and the weight of history are more powerful than anybody else’s cunning and cash and the ups and downs of the market. No doubt they’ll continue to assume that they have meritoriously protected the paper even after their cluelessness has delivered it into other hands.
I’m sure these rumors will grow louder as the year wears on. Do you think the Times would be better off if the family sold it? If so, under whose ownership?
