Coordinates: 40°45′22″N 73°59′25″W / 40.75611°N 73.99028°W / 40.75611; -73.99028
The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) is an American media company best known as the publisher of its namesake, The New York Times . Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. has served as Chairman of the Board since 1997. It is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.
Overview
History
The company was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones in New York, New York. The first edition of the newspaper The New York Times , published on September 18, 1851, stated: "We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come."
Company holdings
Main article: List of assets owned by New York Times CompanyThe New York Times Company also owns The Boston Globe , the International Herald Tribune , and almost two dozen other regional newspapers in the United States (15 of which publish daily). In 2005, its Broadcast Media Group included 35 web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com.
In addition, it is a minority stakeholder in the Boston Red Sox, a position acquired as part of John W. Henry's purchase of the famed baseball team. The Boston Globe and other New York Times Company-owned newspapers acknowledge this relationship in articles about the team.
Company stock profile
Since 1967, The New York Times Company has been publicly traded and listed on the New York Stock Exchange by the symbol NYT. While the company offers two kinds of shares of its stock, Class A and Class B, Class B shares are not publicly traded. The Class B shares provide a mechanism by which the descendants of Adolph Ochs, who purchased the New York Times newspaper in 1896, maintain control of the company by holding nearly 90 percent of this "special class of stock."
Board of Directors
At the April 2005 Board meeting, Class B shareholders elected nine of the fourteen directors of the company.
2008-2009 financial challenges
The company's dual-class ownership structure has deterred outside investors from pushing for change in Ochs-Sulzberger control. As of 2008 Two hedge funds, Harbinger Capital and Firebrand Partners bought 19 percent of The Times . On September 10, 2008, it was reported that Carlos Slim, one of the world's wealthiest men, had acquired a 6.4 percent stake for $120 million. These moves put pressure on the company, whose advertising and circulation have faltered recently, to improve its return to shareholders. The downturn in print advertising sales has recently spread to the Internet, and the recent acquisitions of Times Company stock might put increasing pressure on the family to sell or take the company private to escape Wall Street's attention. The newspaper is currently over one billion dollars in debt.
In December, 2008, the Times Co. said it planned to borrow up to $225 million against its new building, in which it has a 58 percent stake. The company retained Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, to act as its agent to secure financing, either in the form of a mortgage or a sale-leaseback arrangement, said James Follo, the Times Company's chief financial officer. The developer Forest City Ratner owns the rest of the building. In March, 2009, a 15-year sale-leaseback for $225 million with WP Carey & Co. on the Times' share of the building was announced. The NYT Co. will have the right to buy back its part of the building, covered under the arrangement, for $250 million in 10 years, and will pay rent in the interem. The NYT Co. paid more than $600 million for its share of the building, in 2007. Both parties to the sale-leaseback expect the Co. to repurchase its space. Carey CEO Gordon DuGan said "We’re willing to trade a low purchase price and good yield for future appreciation," in a Bloomberg report. "Basically it’s a secured loan," said Craig Evans, a broker with Colliers ABR Inc., a New York-based real estate services firm (affiliate of Colliers International), in the report. "It’s a way for them to borrow significant amounts of money against the value of their offices. And they’re paying a pretty significant price to do that."
On January 19, 2009, the Times Co. announced that it had accepted a $250 million loan from Slim. Slim will receive a 14 percent interest rate and warrants that are convertible into Times Company shares on the loan. He has lost tens of millions on his original equity investment. Under the new financial arrangement, the equity stake could grow to 17 percent, though he will receive no representation on the company’s board and no shares with special voting rights. Bankers representing The Times approached Mr. Slim with the investment opportunity, Slim advisers say. Those bankers, at the firm SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, had first approached The Times with the idea of a deal with Mr. Slim, said a Times spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis. The loan will help ease the company's immediate cash flow problems, which have been reported to include a $400 million credit-line maturity in May. The notes have a six year maturity. The company's continuing financial problems and Slim's ongoing interest, as evidenced by his two interventions in the course of five months, has led to speculation that he might be contemplating an outright takeover of the Times Company.
On January 28, 2009, as the Times Co. reported its earnings plunged 48 percent in the fourth quarter because of lower advertising revenue in a weak economy, he also said it "had retained investment firm Goldman Sachs to help explore a sale of its stake in the company that owns the Boston Red Sox. Investors have been pressuring the company to sell assets .... The company holds a 17.8 percent stake in New England Sports Ventures, which owns the Boston baseball team as well as Fenway Park, a portion of a cable sports network and other properties. The Times reported in December that its parent company was exploring a sale."
On January 28, 2009, The New York Times itself ran an op-ed piece by David Swensen, the author of Pioneering Portfolio Management and chief investment officer at Yale, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst at Yale, entitled "News You Can Endow." The column took note of the challenging financial circumstances of the nation's newspapers, and proposed "another option: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities." In the face of the impact of digital, Internet distribution of news, the change would "free from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society." Steve Coll of The New Yorker and, previously, the Washington Post , responded to the idea, as did the Post' s Howard Kurtz and, in opposition, Slate's Jack Shafer.
On February 19, 2009, The NYT Co. suspended its common share dividends (both classes of stock) completely, having already cut it by 74% to 6 cents per share in November, 2008. It was the first elimination of the dividend in four decades as a publicly traded company, and saved an additional $34 million per year. The NYT Co. laid off 100 employees on March 26, 2009 and cut salaries for the rest of 2009 by 5 percent.
Put aside logic/suicide watch
On May 9, 2009, both op-ed columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich addressed issues of the ill-health of the newspaper industry (or the "news business", as Rich called it, though still addressing newspapers under the grimmer headline). Rich also may have identified the reason for the coinciding focus: the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner "this weekend."
Dowd addressed President Barack Obama's possible feelings for the newspaper industry, and some considerations relative to possible government assistance to the industry. She reported that candidate Obama had told her that he'd briefly and none too successfully tried to sell subscriptions to the Times when he was a student at Columbia. An aide had also told her that candidate Obama "got cranky" when he didn't have a chance to read at least a bit of the Times daily, and she reported that "it was clear from his very first news conference, when I began covering his long-shot bid for the White House" that his "supple mind was nourished by news and books." In the column, Dowd also reflected, as others have, on parallels between President Obama and the character of Spock, on this the (successful) opening weekend of the new Star Trek movie. She referenced his opposition in these terms – "Cheney, Limbaugh and other pitiless Borg aliens firing phasers" – and hearings the previous week held by Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, and addressed, to a degree, the logic and morality of government aid to the newspaper industry.
The Kerry hearings on May 6 had addressed among other ideas a bill proposed by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md, in which "newspapers turning to nonprofit status would no longer be able to make political endorsements but could report on all issues including political campaigns. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt and contributions to support coverage could be tax deductible. The proposal would allow papers to operat
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