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<p>New York Times Co. said Tuesday that its July revenue from continuing operations fell 10.1 percent this year as advertising revenue slipped 16.2 percent. Overall revenue dropped to $235.9 million in July from $262.3 million in July 2007, the publisher said.</p>

Pinch Sulzberger has taken perhaps the most recognizable media brand in the country and run it into the ground. Can the Gray Lady be saved?

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is racing to transform the embattled New York Times for the digital age. Is he up to the job? Corporate annual meetings are generally drowsy affairs—a pep talk by management, some PowerPoint graphics, a little predetermined voting, all topped off by a parade of cranks to the microphones to excoriate management about their pet causes. April’s annual gathering of shareholders in The New York Times Company certainly featured all of those ingredients, down to the codger who shuffled in late, grabbed the seat next to mine, and promptly dozed off. But beneath the surface routine there was...

<p>Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, and his wife, Gail Gregg, have decided to separate, they said in a statement issued Friday.</p>

THE New York Times' news room is bracing for a bloodbath in the next 10 days. The word from inside is that approximately 50 unionized journalists have accepted the buyout proposal, and only another 20 non-union editorial employees have gotten on board. That means the ax could fall on as many as 30 editorial people in the company's first-ever mass firing of journalists in its 156-year history.

The New York Times announced that it's all but a done deal that the paper will have to layoff staffers in the newsroom. The drop-dead deadline is fast approaching for the staffers in The New York Times newsroom to raise their hand and volunteer for a buyout. An internal memo from the paper's assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, just went out and said that "we expect" that the buyout numbers aren't looking good and that for the first time the paper will be forced to cut the newsroom through layoffs. "While layoffs have become all too common across our industry,...

The New York Times is always for higher taxes. But publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't relish paying Uncle Sam any more than he has to. The Post's Braden Keil reports "Pinch" just sold his duplex Central Park-fronting apartment at 1 W. 64th St. to his wife, Gail Gregg, for the relatively low price of $3.25 million, according to city transfers. When quizzed about the odd transaction, a Times spokeswoman said: "The sale was done for estate-planning purposes." Neighbors in the building include Madonna, who briefly put her like-sized duplex on the market for $6.75 million in 1997.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co (NYSE:NYT - News) will eliminate 100 newsroom jobs, the company confirmed on Thursday, as it girds for a weaker economy and an overall decline in print advertising and circulation revenue. The company, which also publishes the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, said it will eliminate these jobs by not filling vacant positions, by offering buyouts and laying off staff, if necessary. The Times's currently employs 1,332 people in its newsroom, a spokeswoman said. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told the newsroom on Thursday morning, according to a...

The New York Times Co (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday posted a 7 percent decline in revenue, dragged by poor real estate and retail advertising sales. Fourth-quarter net income was $53 million, or 37 cents a share, compared with a loss of $648 million, or $4.50 a share, in the fourth quarter last year when it took a large write-down on its New England group. Revenue fell 7.1 percent to $865.8 million. Excluding the write-down and other items from both periods, profit per share from continuing operations fell to 44 cents, compared with 46 cents a share a year...

The New York City Dept. of Buildings is expected to send inspectors to the recently completed New York Times building on West 40th Street and 8th Avenue Jan. 11 to determine what caused seven of the 52-story structure's windows to crack on Wednesday afternoon. The windows, according to the DOB, were located on the 22nd, 10th and sixth floors of the building. Two of the building's signature ceramic rods on the exterior of the 40th and 38th floors were damaged, as well. "Our engineers believe (Wednesday's) high winds were a contributing factor (to the damage)," said DOB spokeswoman Kate Lindquist....

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2008/01/04/the-nyt-bloomberg-merger-could-it-happen

Here is just a tiny, tiny sample of the reaction on the Huffington Post to the announcement that William Kristol will be writing a weekly column in the New York Times: “William ‘the Bloody’ Kristol is a beady eyed warmonger.” “Worthless suck up Kristol should be cleaning toilets in public restrooms for his GOP ‘friends.’” “I will never, ever, buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any NY Times advertiser.” “If the New York Times is going to hire...

The Business Press Maven's head is bent in utter sorrow. Why this time? Well, all the way back on Monday, I was forced to lament the fact that sometimes it was better to just read a company's press release rather than the articles that follow it. As you'll recall, the watermelon-sized merger of Ingersoll Rand (IR) and Trane (TT) was announced just as Sunday night was turning into Monday, and since there were not many sober, experienced business journalists around in the middle of the night, what hit up on the wires for hours on end were regurgitations on the...

snip Their streamlined glass-and-steel forms proclaimed a faith in machine-age efficiency and an open, honest, democratic society. Newspaper journalism, too, is part of that history. Transparency, independence, the free flow of information, moral clarity, objective truth — these notions took hold and flourished in the last century at papers like The Times. To many this idealism reached its pinnacle in the period stretching from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War to Watergate, when journalists grew accustomed to speaking truth to power, and the public could still accept reporters as impartial observers. snip Maybe this accounts for the tower’s...

It's official. Rupert Murdoch, The Wall Street Journal's owner-in-waiting, is going to war against the New York Times and its controlling family, the Sulzbergers. He's repeatedly stated his intention to push the Journal even further into politics, culture and national affairs—editorial territory long dominated by the Old Gray Lady. But Murdoch wasn't always gunning to topple the Times. In fact, he actually envisioned himself as the paper's owner. It's hard to imagine Murdoch, long considered a political conservative, ever owning the Times. Over the years the paper has been Murdoch's foil and foe, criticized regularly by his New York Post...

<p>It should have been a good week for the New York Times-controlling Sulzberger family after they beat back a cantankerous shareholder, ending a two-year battle over the dual-class share system the company employs to keep the family in control of the newspaper publisher.</p>

Once again, the Watergate maxim that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" is proving valid. And Clark Hoyt, "public editor" (ombudsman) of the New York Times is playing the part of John Dean in what could be titled "All the Publisher's Men." The revelations about the MoveOn "betray us" ad contained in Hoyt's column today raise serious questions about the integrity of the company's management. Members of the Sulzberger/Ochs family who control the Times have even more reason to be gravely concerned the very survival of their patrimony is being jeopardized by incompetence or worse on the part of Pinch...

NEW YORK, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Monday changed its outlook on the New York Times Co. (NYT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) to negative, from stable, citing increased pressure on the publisher's advertising from other media as well as from a downturn in the housing market. A negative outlook indicates the company's debt is likely to be downgraded over the next 12 to 18 months. The New York Times is currently ranked "Baa1," the third-lowest investment grade rating. "The negative rating outlook results from increased pressure on the company's retail and classified advertising from cross media competition and...

After enduring a century and a half of change in Lower Manhattan, decrepit and anonymous, the birthplace of The New York Times is now being torn down, brick by brick. By an odd turn of history, the demolition of The Times’s oldest home occurred just as the company settles into its seventh and newest headquarters, a 52-story tower across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Yesterday, a worker armed with an appropriately 19th-century demolition tool — a sledgehammer — sat astride the south wall of 113 Nassau Street, between Ann and Beekman Streets, pounding chunks of the structure...

It's Forward Into Battle!" That's how Newsweek describes the impending battle between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, once Rupert Murdoch is legally owner of the financial daily. There are all sorts of predictions about what will happen, particularly how Murdoch might change the Wall Street Journal, And what the New York Times will do to meet the challenge. Newsweek, at least, predicts “all-out war”. Others don't go quite so far, but there is agreement that Murdoch has lots of ideas for the Wall Street Journal once he takes over. If he accomplishes them all, he will...

Despite his remarks on coverage, some expect changes on the Journal's business side first. If the Gray Lady didn't have enough problems battling industrywide woes, now she has Rupert Murdoch to worry about. The media billionaire has made no secret of his desire to take aim at the New York Times once his News Corp. acquires Dow Jones & Co. and its flagship Wall Street Journal in a $5-billion deal expected to close this fall. Murdoch said during an earnings conference call last week that he wanted the financial newspaper to have "more coverage of national, international and nonbusiness news...

The Herald-Tribune is revamping its features sections and consolidating its Venice, North Port, Englewood and Port Charlotte operations, a move that will result in an unspecified number of layoffs. The media company will drop the daily Florida West section, adding more focused tabloid-size sections resembling Ticket. The consolidated southern operations will be based in Venice. With the consolidation, the Herald-Tribune will start new interactive Web sites geared toward allowing the public to share their news, photos and videos. Newspapers around the country have been trimming their print reports and expanding their Web coverage. In coastal Florida, that trend toward digital...

NEW YORK His Saturday business column for The New York Times (available online only via TimesSelect) mainly explores how the Bancroft family blew the deal with the News Corp. But Joseph Nocera closes it with a brief sit-down interview with new owner Rupert Murdoch at his headquarters in New York, just after the deal closes. “The first road to freedom,” Murdoch explains, after (like Nocera) removing his tie and relaxing, “is viability.” This refers to the Wall Street Journal making healthy profits again, thereby allowing it to remain editorial independent. There is no "or else" uttered but it may be...

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned. After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter. The timing of when TimesSelect will shut down hinges on resolving software issues associated with making the switch to a free service, the source said. Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis would only say in an e-mailed statement, "We continue...

New York Times May Advertising Revenue Down 8.5 Percent, Internet Ad Sales Up NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Times Co. said Thursday that advertising revenue from continuing operations dropped 8.5 percent in May as national, retail and classified ads all declined. The company said its total revenue from continuing operations fell 5.8 percent compared with May of last year. The New York Times' media properties include its namesake newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe and more than 30 Web sites including NYTimes.com and About.com. Advertising revenue for the New York Times Media Group dropped 9.1 percent...

NEW YORK With all the industry activity over the past year -- Knight Ridder, Tribune and now Dow Jones -- Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani looks at other potential targets in a note released to investors. The most likely company to go on the block given how its shares are trading: The New York Times Co. "All signs point to the New York Times," wrote Quadrani. It has all the elements of a take-out candidate including restive shareholders, lagging margins, low debt, and a strong brand name. The market certainly thinks as much, despite the controlling Sulzberger family's protestations to...

All is not well at the new New York Times headquarters. It seems the inmates are not pleased with their new asylum, and thus an "it's not so bad!" feature went up on Ahead of the Times, the in-house party paper of choice, to quell the brewing discontent. A highlight, regarding the sound the toilet makes when flushing: "Some people liken it to a small animal being strangled. Personally, I hear a couple of high, whiny notes from the Sopranos' theme music." Delightful! The article—rather great!—follows. Greetings From Eighth Avenue! How's the new building? Lad Paul, executive editor of News...

The New York Times Company annual shareholder meeting traditionally has been a tame affair, where the Sulzberger family, which owns a controlling interest in the company, applauds the achievements of its journalists and, in turn, basks in the applause of investors. But times have changed. With the company’s stock performance lagging, along with much of the newspaper industry, the chairman and publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his family are bracing for a contentious meeting today. Last year, dissident investors, led by Hassan Elmasry, a senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, withheld 30 percent of their votes for the...

As the New York Times Company braces for a shareholder revolt at its annual meeting scheduled for April 24, Chairman Arthur Sulzberger may have found a potential lifeline: billionaire Howard Milstein. Milstein, the C.E.O. of Emigrant Bancorp--the privately held New York bank with a history stretching back to 1850 and assets of $15 billion--bought 6 million shares of the New York Times Company in December, according to S.E.C. filings. He is now the sixth largest institutional shareholder with a 4.3 percent stake in the Times Company worth $150 million. A person with knowledge of Milstein's investment said Milstein is an...

New York Times 1Q Profit Drops on Weakness in Print Advertising, Charges NEW YORK (AP) -- Newspaper publisher New York Times Co. said Thursday that its first-quarter profit fell 26 percent, hurt by weakness in print advertising and various charges. Earnings declined to $23.9 million, or 17 cents per share, from $32.4 million, or 22 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Income from continuing operations dropped to $20.1 million, or 14 cents per share, from $30.5 million, or 21 cents per share, in the previous year. The current quarter's results were hurt by an accelerated depreciation expense of $6.7...

Boston Globe editor Martin Baron sent the following note to the staff today concerning employee buyouts in the newsroom: To the staff: I’d like to update you on the buyout. We have accepted buyout applications from 24 of our colleagues in the newsroom. A handful of buyout applications were approved over the last several weeks, and some people already have left the Globe. The vast majority are being notified of their acceptance today, and they will leave the newsroom on various dates over the next few months. The dates have been set so that the newsroom has time to adjust...

In late June 2005, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., chairman of New York Times Co., received a letter from a little-known London-based portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley named Hassan Elmasry. It began mildly. "I read my first copy of the New York Times nearly 30 years ago in my high-school library in suburban Chicago," wrote Mr. Elmasry, whose fund then owned a 5% stake in Times Co. snip Late last month, for the first time, Mr. Elmasry walked into the New York Times boardroom and addressed its full board, including Mr. Sulzberger. That day, the company also heard from another major...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- New York Times Co.(NYT:23.81, -0.14, -0.6% ) said late Tuesday February revenue from continuing operations fell 3.6% from the same month last year, while advertising revenue from continuing operations dropped 6%.</p>

Despite his personal fortune and impressive lineage, Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the most respected newspaper in the world, is a stressed man. Why would the man behind the New York Times be stressed? Well, profits from the paper have been declining for four years, and the Times company's market cap has been shrinking, too. Its share lags far behind the benchmark, and just last week, the group Sulzberger leads admitted suffering a $570 million loss because of write offs and losses at the Boston Globe. As if that weren't enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set...

The New York Times dynasty is pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of Morgan Stanley in response to a fund manager's move, Tim Arango reports in a Fortune exclusive. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Arthur Sulzberger Jr. survived the Jayson Blair scandal and Judith Miller's jailing, but as proxy season beckons, the publisher and chairman of The New York Times faces a new challenge. This one is from Hassan Elmasry, a London- based managing director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management who has been trying to incite a shareholder revolt against Sulzberger. Unfortunately for Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Elmasry's campaign...

New York Times Reports 4Q Loss of $648M Wednesday January 31, 9:29 am ET By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer New York Times Reports 4Q Loss of $648M in Writing Down Value of Struggling Mass. Newspapers NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Times Co. posted a $648 million loss for the fourth quarter on Wednesday as it absorbed an $814.4 million charge to write down the value of its struggling New England properties, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The company said the non-cash charge reflected declines in current and projected results at the newspapers, which...

NEW YORK -- Morgan Stanley's asset-management arm issued its latest assault on the New York Times Co., sharply criticizing the company's refusal to allow a shareholder vote on ending its dual-stock structure. In a letter to the company, Morgan Stanley money manager Hassan Elamsry said the firm is "disappointed" the New York Times refused to include a nonbinding shareholder proposal on the stock structure. (Read the text of the letter.) The fund, which holds 7% of New York Times Class A shares, also seemed to encourage New York Times' public shareholders to withhold support for company director nominees at this...

NEW YORK The New York Times Company is centralizing much of the classified advertising collection efforts of its 15 regional newspapers to a single location, a spokeswoman said today. The move is likely to result in job cuts at a number of the newspapers. "These are operating efficiency measures that the publishers talked to their papers about yesterday," said Abbe Serphos, director of public relations for The New York Times Company. "We anticipate that these will significantly increase efficiency, improve customer service and help to standardize common business processes across the regional media group." Serphos said the centralization, expected to...

n the house where I grew up, everybody ate breakfast at the same time. The younger ones would sit at the table elbowing one another for toast while my dad stood, drinking coffee and reading The Minneapolis Star Tribune. He would mumble and curse at the headlines, check the sports and then tell us it was time to go. When my brother John became a teenager, he left the table and would eat his toast, leaning against the washing machine and reading the paper as well. This, I thought, is what it means to be a grown-up. You eat your...

CHICAGO Saying it expected The New York Times Co.'s financial situation to remain "weak" for the next two years, Standard & Poor's Rating Services (S&P) Tuesday cut its ratings for the company's long-term corporate and senior unsecured debt. S&P downgraded the Times Co. long-term corporate and unsecured debt to "BBB+" from "A-." "While New York Times will benefit from the planned debt reduction with proceeds from the sale of its broadcast media group, the company's financial profile is expected to remain weak for the new ratings while it completes two major capital projects in 2007 and 2008," S&P said. The...

Times are so tough at the New York Times that the publishing giant can't afford to move many of its staffers into its glitzy new Eighth Avenue headquarters. With office rental rates soaring in Midtown, Times chief Janet Robinson and head bean-counter Len Forman said this week that the company is actively looking to rent out even more than the five floors it had marked for other tenants earlier this year. The Times had originally planned to put its employees in all 28 of its floors in the 52-storey skyscraper, set to open this spring. Some of that space was...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Ochs-Sulzberger family will not agree to scrap The New York Times Co.'s (NYT.N: Quote, Profile , Research) dual-class share structure, which gives them more control of the newspaper publisher, Chief Executive Janet Robinson said on Wednesday. The structure has come under fire in the past year from shareholders unhappy with the company's performance. Hassan Elmasry, who supervises Morgan Stanley Investment Management's 7.6 percent stake in the Times, has called on the company to give all shareholders equal representation. The family "has no intention of opening any of our doors to the action that is tearing...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- New York Times Co. (NYT) Tuesday evening said November advertising revenue from continuing operations decreased 3.8% to $189.9 million from $197.4 million during the same period in the prior year. The media company said total November revenue from continuing operations fell 1.7% to $278.5 million from $283.3 million in the prior year. Monthly advertising revenue fell 4.2% for the New York Times Media Group, fell 10.7% for the New England Media Group, and fell 1.3% for the Regional Media Group. The company added that circulation revenue for November fell 0.4% -- with revenue gaining at the...

New York Times Co. (NYT) Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and other members of the family that controls the newspaper publisher held talks with a trusted financial adviser about taking the company private, according to a report on the Web site of BusinessWeek magazine.

Even before restive shareholders began ramping up pressure on the New York Times Co. (NYT) and insurance mogul Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg started buying shares, Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. was thinking about taking the company private. In recent months, he has been quietly soliciting advice from trusted friend and financial adviser Steven Rattner, according to sources familiar with those discussions. Rattner today runs Quadrangle Group, an investment firm he co-founded in 2000. But he and Sulzberger have been friends since the early 1980s, when both men were reporters in the Times' Washington bureau. Rattner's firm, which is active in...

GREENBERG PUTS SQUEEZE ON PINCH'S PAPER EXCLUSIVE November 29, 2006 -- Billionaire insurance titan Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has begun buying huge blocks of New York Times stock to break the Sulzberger family's stranglehold on the media empire, The Post has learned. Sources confirmed that the famously combative Greenberg has been buying hundreds of thousands of Times shares, but did not disclose the exact number or the size of the stake he wants to own. Greenberg has both the assets - Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.2 billion - and the temperament to jump into a fight over the future...

--Citigroup said The New York Times continues to remain vulnerable to online share erosion and transition risk. It added that the accelerating rate of online substitution overwhelms the positive trends of older demographics and slowing broadband adoption. --Analyst William Bird said the publisher has less strategic flexibility than its peers given its high dependence on circulation revenues, which is 28 percent against the industry average of 18 percent. (Reporting by Rajeshwari Sharma in Bangalore)

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Citigroup downgraded New York Times Co. (NYT) to sell from hold, citing high valuation, a low probability of a takeover and the continuing trend of readers migrating from print media to online. "Even though two secular forces should be helping the industry -- older demographics and slowing broadband adoption -- the actual circulation trends are getting worse," Citigroup said. "The only conclusion we can draw from this data is that the pace of Internet substitution is accelerating so fast, it's overwhelming two positive underlying trends."

Best Of Times, Worst of Times November 17, 2006 These are dark days for the newspaper industry. Almost every week brings news of worse profits and more job cuts. But a handful of family-owned papers, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, have managed to insulate themselves from Wall Street’s pressure. Brooke speaks with New Yorker staff writer Ken Auletta about the battle between the market and the press. * Listen * Email * Print BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Some of the nation's best...