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The Gray Lady's Children
August 1st, 2007

With The Wall Street Journal in the hands of media baron Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post and Fox News, will The New York Times go the same route and sell to the highest bidder? Better yet, can the Times answer that question itself on the pages of its own paper with the tenacity of its coverage of the Journal’s sale?

That’s what the Times public editor, who is supposed to represent its readers opinions, asked recently. Both papers are family run, and both have also been suffering losses in profits. If someone were to dangle a large enough amount of money in front of the Sulzberger family, which runs the Times, would they cash out?

Its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., thinks not. “The center will hold,” he declared in the public editor’s column.

Business Week’s blogger Jon Fine thinks that’s great. But in a letter penned to Sulzberger for his blog, he argues the broadsheet needs to survive the turmoil in the newspaper world and avoid the pressure from outside investors to sell out.

To do so, he posits the family should sell off some of their properties like About.com and The Boston Globe – and then find somebody willing to buy up all the stock that the family does not own, just to protect the institution, not profit from it.

The Times, he says, “remains the only one around that could, plausibly, enlist a few very rich dudes to accept less-than-stellar returns so their obits can say they saved The New York Times.”

By Mike Muller on August 1, 2007, 11:55 am
In category: Economy, Gotham City | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “The Gray Lady's Children”

  1. Gotham Gazette - The Wonkster » Blog Archive » Bloomberg and the Times: Like Chocolate and Peanut Butter Says:
    January 3rd, 2008 at 12:50 pm

    [...] would satisfy Jon Fine from BusinessWeek. He wrote a letter to the Times’ publisher in July suggesting they seek a rich benefactor in defense of newspaper industry [...]

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