Dead Tree 8.0

by StockJockey

Thursday, February 08, 2007 - 4:00 pm

Yahoo! is trying to right itself. Terry Semel had better get the stock moving up or else.

No worries...if he can’t get the stock higher someone can buy it...for the right price. The stock has been working again...it might be worth more to someone else.

This asset is mismanaged too...but that pesky dual class structure is problematic

And lifetime employment?

It clings to life in some corner offices

By Eytan Avriel

Arthur Sulzberger, on life in the Internet age

“Will we print the NY Times in five years? I don’t care,” says the NY Times publisher

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 now, 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 to a loss of $570 million because of writeoffs and losses at the Boston Globe.

As if that weren’t enough, his personal bank, Morgan Stanley, recently set out on a campaign that could cost the man control over the paper.

All this may explain why Sulzberger does not talk with the press.

But perhaps the rarified Alpine air at the World Economic Forum at Davos relaxes the CEOs of the world’s leading companies, and what began as a casual chat ended in a fascinating glimpse into Sulzberger’s world and how he sees the future of the news business.

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care, either,” he says. He’s looking at how best to manage the transition from print to Internet.

“Internet is a wonderful place to be and we’re leading there,” he adds. The Times has doubled its online readership, and now has 1.1 million subscribing to the print edition - and 1.5 million readers online, each day.

The New York Times is on a journey, Sulzberger says, and its end will be the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will be the end of the transition.

It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps in the road, says the man at the driving wheel: but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.

Don’t plan on it reading it gratis however…

Will it be free?

It will not, Sulzberger avers: if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay.

In the age of bloggers, what is the future of online newspapers and the profession in general?

There are millions of bloggers out there and if the Times forgets who and what it is, it will lose the war, and rightly so, re Sulzberger. “We are curators,” he explains: curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs: they want reliable news that they can trust.

“We aren’t ignoring what’s happening: we understand well that the newspaper is not the focal point of city life as it was ten years ago,” he says.

Once upon a time, you had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theatre: today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information. But the paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers, “We need to be part of that community,” he says: to have dialog with the online world.