THE OLD GRAY LADY

Notes of Concern…

                               …Jackson Blair

The Further Graying of

"THE OLD GRAY LADY"

The print newspaper business has been facing serious difficulties in recent years. Those of us who still like to have a real “paper” in our hands are gradually being overrun by those who find their news online.

Our local newspapers, often referred to as the “family” newspaper have been a mainstay for many years. Because they deal with “news” about people you actually know, report deaths of folks you have known your whole life, tells you how well your neighbors’ kids are doing in sports or in school, and honors local heroes like firemen and policemen you get meaningful reporting on a regular basis. You also find sales information from local advertisers. You can see what a pound of ground beef is going to cost you at the store you can walk to!

These local newspapers are going to be around for as long as there are local communities. This is a cause for celebration.

Today my focus is on The New York Times, arguably one of the grandest of the grand papers. Often known as the “paper of record.” A newspaper talked about in the salons of the very rich and most powerful people.

Wikipedia notes:

“Nicknamed "the Old Gray Lady",^[6] and long regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record", The New York Times is owned by The New York Times Company, which also publishes 18 other newspapers including the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. The company's chairman is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896.”

If you follow the travails of these large newspapers you have noticed that the content of many of them has shrunk. At the same time the purchase price has risen. They scurry around trying to find ways to hang on to their readership while their stock price plunges.

Reuters reported this week that this internationally acclaimed paper, The New York Times, paid out $24 million to their former CEO when she left the company.

Not a misprint.

You read it right.

$24 million!

Keeping in mind this is a newspaper once at the top of the heap and now with a price- per- share of about $6…(not that I am suggesting you run out and buy up the remaining shares), is on a very slippery slope financially.

So a former CEO leaves, retires or whatever. What struck me about her package was that contractually she got the money whether she quit, was fired or retired.

Who writes contracts like that?

 We need to find that contract writer and put him to work on our own contracts. Even if you have to pay him 50% you could still walk away with $12 million.

To put this in perspective, Reuters also reports that the salary of the current Sulzberger running The New York Times last year was $5.9 million.

Okay.

Take another sip of your hot coffee, breathe in and out, and digest that information.

The fellow running The New York Times during the massive decrease in circulation and the collapse of the share price was awarded almost $6 million dollars for his expertise and leadership!

Readers-we are in the wrong line of work. You cannot make this stuff up.

This mess didn’t just start this year at the New York based paper. It has been in the making for a number of years. I abandoned my own subscription about two years ago. Evidently there must have been an epidemic of “The New York Times Flu” going around because thousands came down with “cancelitis” around the same time I did and as thousands continue to come down with the disease no cure has yet been found.

Many people still love The Times. People buy it for the high level of writing. Others buy it because of the great book review section or the editorials. Some folks buy it to stay competitive in their business. I am guessing the demographics of the people who still purchase The New York Times would show that most of them are, shall we say, older! Let me take it a step further in saying that this group is auditioning to appear in the not too distant future on The Times obituary page.

It is not my lot in life to be a newspaper critic. I am one individual offering my own opinion on the tragic situation at an historic newspaper. I have no insider information. I do not own shares in the company. None of my relatives bore the Sulzberger name.

I do not thrill at the prospect of this once great newspaper crumbling before my eyes. It is never a thing of joy to see something this historic fall on bad times.

That being said, if those wise board members at The New York Times asked a small town guy like me to save them, I have no grand plan but I know what my first steps would be:

1.   Get the best New York City attorney you can find and look for loopholes in that $24 million dollar contract;

2.   Change the current publisher’s contract to eliminate any kind of similar payout, then terminate him and replace him with a great guy willing to work for “slave wages,” like $1-2 million dollars.

If successful in these first two small steps I would have immediately saved The New York Times around $28 million, and before I even got my coffee or read the daily paper.

Do these people just live in a different world than the rest of us?