Found! Someone Who’s Optimistic About the New York Times!
by Peter Kafka
Posted on November 25, 2008 at 2:30 AM PT
The New York Times is doomed, right? This is becoming conventional wisdom among the Web cognoscenti, which gives them occasion to shake their heads ruefully and/or chastise the paper for not becoming Webby enough (never mind that the paper’s problem isn’t its inability to “influence the conversation”–it’s about not selling enough ads to cover its payroll).
But here, for what it’s worth, is a vote of confidence from people who presumably don’t care that the Times has yet to hire an army of semipro bloggers: Professional investors. Harbinger Capital Partners, the largest public shareholder in the New York Times (NYT), has purchased yet another block of stock. Last week the fund bought 50,000 shares at $5.12 a piece, according to a SEC filing.
The good news: Those shares were worth $6.64 each when the market closed on Monday. That’s a profit of $76,000 in a couple days.
The bad news: Harbinger has been steadily acquiring stock since last winter. And over that stretch of time, it has gotten hammered. In March, it owned 28.3 million shares worth $18.43 each–a 20 percent stake in the company, worth about $521 million. As of yesterday, it owned 28.5 million shares, worth $189 million.
Maybe the cognoscenti are onto something, after all.
Comments
I hope the New York Times falls hard on its face. What a piece of s***t news paper. So far left its a joke. Good bye NYT!
Posted by Quincy Davis at November 25th, 2008 at 6:31 amI used to work at the Boston Globe back in the day and my fond memories always tempted me to invest in NYT. They were a rock-solid name and had a nice dividend, but I never pulled the trigger. Thankfully, I was listening and paying attention to the drumbeat of “newspapers are dying.” I don’t know how they’re going to get out of it if they do…
Posted by Carlos Portocarrero at November 25th, 2008 at 8:24 amWhile I too celebrate the hardships of the left-wing media their problem have nothing to do with their politics and if anything left-wing content on the Internet has zoomed ahead of conservative competition.
While we are many years away from print media being totally dead, we are far far past there being a need for as much of it as still exists.
Media companies need to embrace the Internet in every way possible. These toe in the water experiments not only don’t work, they drive users away, making bolder experiments in the future less likely to succeed.
I *do* subscribe to the WSJ online, but in general I resent time-wasting prompts from newspapers to enter some sort of ID and password. Clue: run your ads in every article, not just your front page. I don’t have to enter a password to buy a paper from a newsstand and it still counts as circulation, why should online be any different?
My guess is that the number of eyeballs falling on NYT articles is at an all time high thanks to the Internet. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t end up viewing a NYT article, and yet I have never been a subscriber.
The problem is not measurement tools or the numbers themselves for Internet views (which are quite accurate). The problem is that the old system was a scam waiting for something better to come along.
It has.
Posted by Mac Beach at November 25th, 2008 at 12:04 pmMac: I agree. You would think that not having to print out their papers would save them tons of money and they could just monetize their sites, but why haven’t they been able to? Is it really because the old system was so bad? That seems hard to swallow.
Posted by Carlos Portocarrero at November 25th, 2008 at 12:34 pm