Investors Bearish on Future of NYT
Every Sunday morning, for many years, one of the very first things that I, and millions of other people, do, is to open the front door and pick up The New Your Times. Ever since the newspaper created its national edition, and offered home delivery here, a continent away from The City, that blue-plastic-wrapped bundle of newsprint has been a companion, through good times and bad.
But, as President Barack Obama is pointing out to us on a daily basis, the global economy is staggering toward a halt, teetering on the verge of “catastrophe,” (his word). It is at moments like these that the Times is usually at its best — with long, well-reported analytical pieces of the various policy proposals being battled out in Washington by the parties who control our public policy debate.
Even as the newspaper continues to provide this type of coverage, which, arguably is equaled in its depth by only a few other publications — The New Yorker, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Washington Post – its business model increasingly appears to be in shambles.
Thus, one of the windows I’ve kept open on my laptop today is tracking how the poorly Times’ stock is faring on Wall Street. It’s down almost 10 percent (twice as bad as the market as a whole) to around four bucks and a quarter per share. The company’s market cap is hovering just north of $600 million — roughly one-fifth of its value just a year ago.
In a related development, though I’m not generally a huge fan of “crowd-sourcing,” one recent exercise over at the CAPS index, which is the aggregated community wisdom of 125,000 investors affiliated with the Motley Fool, recently downgraded the Times to “one star,” indicating that it is expected to under-perform the market going forward.
This is only one indicator, and from a site some of my colleagues do not like, but having spent much of the past year testing out the “wisdom of crowds” theory at Predictify.com, I tend to watch these crowd-sourcing experiments with rather more respect than I might have in the past.
The reason is that in my experience, the crowd tends to guess how company stocks will move with a greater degree of accuracy than, say, which teams are going to play in next year’s Super Bowl. So, take this data with a large grain of sea salt, if you wish, but the CAPS’ downgrade, combined with the skepticism expressed by most of the mainstream media analysts lately, has got to keep the Sulzberger Family counting up their collective gray hairs as they contemplate how to save their old gray lady.
In addition to serving as a BNET Media analyst/blogger, David Weir is a veteran journalist and the author of several books. Weir is a co-founder and vice-president of the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as an editorial board member of The Nation.
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