Take a look at the attached stock price chart and you get some idea what it must feel like to be one of the owners of the New York Times. Over the past couple of years, the poor souls who were trusting enough to buy into the New York Times Company have been repeatedly beaten with a stick. Stock in the Times Company lags the Washington Post, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and, worst of all, Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp by a mile. No doubt you can find a worse investment, sub-prime mortgage companies perhaps, but it would hard to do so.
It’s not just a newspaper thing. The Post is a newspaper too. Yes newspapers are having a rough time, but the time is rougher for some than for others. Overall newspaper circulation is down, but The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have taken much heavier hits than the industry as a whole. Some papers, such as the Wall Street Journal, have basically held even, and the New York Post (heavens, Murdoch again!) has actually grown...
So, if the problem isn’t the global environment, the local environment, the labor environment, technology, the subscription model or regional conditions, perhaps it’s the newspaper. Could the problem be that the New York Times has a liberal bias? Perhaps....
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