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SULZBERGERS' FIRM-BASED INCOME SLIPS TO $4.5M The Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 has run the venerable NY Times empire has now lost more than 86% of its fortune and may have to sell their controlling stake to get out of debt......about two dozen descendants had comfortable lifestyles, living on wealth valued as high as $425M....down to a paltry $4.5M, which could shrink even more. Soaring losses amid a devastating media slump have drained corporate cash, pushed the company deeper into $1.3B debt and beckoned a stock vulture -- Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who bailed out the Times with a high-interest $250M...

IN 1972, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was looking for a conservative columnist for his left-leaning Op-Ed page. At a charity dinner, he wound up sitting next to William Safire, the Nixon White House speechwriter who coined Spiro Agnew’s famous denunciation of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” They soon had a deal. But, as described in “The Trust,” the authoritative history of the family that has controlled The Times for more than a century, Sulzberger neglected to involve John Oakes, his cousin and the editor of the editorial page, in the decision. Oakes...

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.

N.Y. Times Shares Decline on Downgrade Friday June 9, 5:05 pm ET New York Times Shares Fall 1.6 Percent Following Analyst Downgrade NEW YORK (AP) -- Shares of The New York Times Co. fell Friday after an analyst at Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock to "underperform." Shares of the company, which also owns The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, fell 38 cents, or 1.6 percent, to close at $23.66 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, after falling to a 52-week low of $23.13 earlier in the session. Peter Appert, a newspaper industry analyst at Goldman Sachs, downgraded...

Kincaid: "Mr. Chairman. My name is Cliff Kincaid with Accuracy in Media. I will wait before getting into the praise and criticism I have of the paper's journalistic and editorial processes. But on the matter of business operations, this is a shareholders meeting, and I think it's about time that the company level with the shareholders about how much money was paid to Judith Miller in her controversial severance package. What is that figure?" Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger: "Mr. Kincaid, we actually don't discuss the specifics of any employee's salary or compensation or severance. But I do believe in the...

If you want to understand the disastrous decline of the New York Times in recent years, a good place to start is this National Review Online "Media Blog" post on a commencement speech given by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Stephen Spruiell of "Media Blog" links to the text of Sulzberger's speech, so you can read the whole thing if you want. What struck me about the quoted excerpts was their stupidity. This does not seem to be a very smart man. Example: "It wasn't supposed to be this way," Sulzberger said. "You weren't supposed to be graduating in...

New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s wild left-wing rant at a graduation ceremony in New York... Sulzberger “apologized” to graduates at the State University ...for the failure of his generation to stop the Iraq War and to sufficiently promote “fundamental human rights” like abortion, immigration, and gay marriage... He begins with a facetious “apology” to the class for being part of the generation that let them down due to insufficient liberal activism. “When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon. OK. OK. That’s not quite true. Maybe there were larger...

N.Y. Times Publisher Apologizes for Boomers New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told a college graduating class that he was ”sorry” for his generation’s failure to achieve the goals it had set back when he was a college student. "When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon,” he told about 900 graduates of the State University of New York at New Paltz on Sunday. "Okay, that’s not quite true. Maybe there were larger forces at play. "Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better,...

Newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period ending in March, according to data released Monday, as the industry continued to struggle with competition from other media outlets and the Internet. The decline in average paid weekday circulation was about the same as the previous time newspapers reported six-month circulation figures for the period ending last September, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group. The NAA reported that average paid circulation at Sunday newspapers fell 3.1 percent versus the same period a year ago, also a comparable decline with the last time circulation figures were reported....

Facing shareholder dissent and getting flak for bloated executive pay deals, The New York Times is frantically searching for crisis p.r. experts as the company gears up for a public battle over the future of the newspaper giant. Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and other top management have been criticized for putting off the concerns of Morgan Stanley portfolio manager Hassan Elmasry and for a share price that's plummeted 50 percent since 2002. Soon after Morgan's attack last week on The Times, the publisher's spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, was phoning Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon seeking advice, sources familiar with the...

An article in Business Day on Wednesday about investors in The New York Times Company who withheld their votes for directors misspelled the name of the family that has controlled the company since 1896. It is Ochs-Sulzberger, not Ochs-Sulzburger.

Opinion: The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week 4. Penny Ante The New York Times Co. (NYT:NYSE - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) is feeling the pinch of aggrieved shareholders. Big investors took a shot across management's bow this week by withholding 28% of votes from the company's board slate. A 5.6% holder, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, wants to eliminate the Class B stock that gives the Sulzberger family control of the board despite its tiny financial stake. "MSIM believes that the dual-class voting at The New York Times Company, which is an exception to the general...

Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr., the scion of a family dynasty founded by his great grandfather, is well into the process of destroying the patrimony handed to him on a silver platter. Even worse, the whole world is starting to notice, something which will make other family members distinctly unhappy. And because the family controls the election of a majority of the board of directors of the New York Times Company, despite owning a tiny fraction of the actual equity (thanks to a two class system of shares), this unhappiness could affect Pinch’s tenure in office. No less an authority...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- New York Times Co. on Wednesday said it expects first-quarter earnings to be in the range of 22 to 24 cents a share, including expenses of 2 to 4 cents a share related to job cuts the company announced last September. New York Times Co. (NYT) earned 76 cents a share a year earlier, bolstered by a gain totaling 46 cents a share from a sale of company headquarters and another property. New York Times said first-quarter earnings may also be impacted if it is determined that one of its joint venture equity investments has lost value....

Motley Fool A Dubious Sign of the Times Tuesday March 7, 3:17 pm ET By Tim Beyers I've long wanted to own stock in New York Times (NYSE: NYT - News) for several reasons. I love the paper. I'm a big fan of About.com. And then there's sentimental angle: I'm a New York native. But there's one big reason why I'm not buying the stock. A check of the proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday reveals that chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson both received hefty bonuses despite meeting less than 60%...

Traitors of Record: The Record of the New York TimesBy Fedora “. . .the most untrustworthy paper in the United States. . .” --President Dwight Eisenhower, referring to the New York TimesIntroductionLast week Senator John Cornyn criticized the New York Times for endangering national security with a James Risen story on NSA surveillance timed to coincide with a vote on the Patriot Act and, incidentally, with the release of a book by Risen. A review of the record illustrates that endangering national security through irresponsible leaks is nothing new for the New York Times. Some particularly outrageous examples are worth...

But, said Jane Eisner in the Philadelphia Inquirer, it was no time for gloating. "Even if the departures [of the editors] were necessary - and certainly they were - this is a heartbreaking development." The Los Angeles Times agreed, saying "commentators who once relied on the paper as the virtual 'gold standard' of information suddenly wondered whether the Times could restore its lofty reputation". "The move is expected to intensify the self-scrutiny already prompted in newsrooms across the country," said the Christian Science Monitor, "but it is rare for an editor to take responsibility for failings on his watch." In...

"You ought to work for The New York Times" used to be high praise for a journalist. Now it's an attack on your credibility. And that, in the end, is why Times editor Howell Raines had to resign. The proudest masthead in journalism has been reduced to a punch line, and the responsibility fell properly on Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd... Politicians, I hear, used to have the same understanding. Well, no longer, for them or for us. Journalism Web sites -- many of them accessible to the public -- have opened things up, and intense competition among...

June 6, 2003 Times's 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer's FraudBy JACQUES STEINBERG owell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesHowell Raines, left, announced his resignation in the newsroom yesterday, with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., center, and Gerald M. Boyd, right, in suit. In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur...

The New York Times, which has been under fire recently for the Jayson Blair scandal and also for left-biased reporting, has announced the resignation of its controversial executive editor and its managing editor. Here's the report from the NewsMax.com website, reprinted by permission. NewsMax.com - New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, caught up in the paper's recent scandals, have resigned, the corporation said today. "This is a day that breaks my heart," Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told employees this morning. ''Mean-Spirited'' Even before getting caught up in the uproar over the publishing of fictional...

Editor's note: Just a few hours after this column was published, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd resigned from their positions at The New York Times. The New York Times Corporation has long been a different kind of media enterprise. Just as there are two classes of NYT stock, there are two classes of companies that comprise the whole. In a class by itself is The New York Times newspaper. It is the raison d'etre of the larger enterprise. Everything else falls into the general category of "cash cow," there to feed 43rd Street. Much of the managerial dysfunction of The...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) _ Here is the full text of New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger's memo to the staff this morning.</p> <p>As you can see from the attached press release, this morning I accepted the resignations of Howell Raines, our executive editor, and Gerald Boyd, our managing editor. Both Howell and Gerald have made enormous and lasting contributions to The Times over their long and distinguished careers. Given the events of the last month, however, Howell and Gerald concluded that it was best for The Times that they step down. With great sadness, I agreed with their decision. Joe Lelyveld will return to serve as interim executive editor until the selection of new executive and managing editors is made. Since most of you know Joe, you'll understand why we can all be confident that during this interim period the immediate responsibility for the quality of our journalism will be in very good hands.</p>

A stuffed moose made an appearance last week at the big New York Times staff meeting held in a Broadway movie theater to deal with the uproar over the fraudulent reporting of Jayson Blair, the young black Times reporter who has resigned. To The Times' publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, the moose is a variation of the elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about. So Sulzberger brought it along to encourage staffers to be candid. Okay, in the spirit of the moose, let's be candid. Yes, we need more minority reporters and editors. But when applicants don't meet...

MAY 12--Apparently we weren't the only ones who thought that yesterday's New York Times examination of Jayson Blair's fabrications fell a bit short when it came to the brass taking responsibility for the scandal (geez, they moved Blair around the Times like Cardinal Law shuffled priests in Boston). This afternoon, Times staffers received the below memo from "Arthur, Howell & Gerald"--that would be publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., executive editor Howell Raines, and managing editor Gerald Boyd--noting that the ruling triumvirate accepted responsibility for the monumental fiasco. "In the case of Jayson Blair, our organizational safeguards and our individual responses were...