Shareholder Revolt @ The New York Times

Well, as my friend Fireman John has oft repeated, "the markets are ALWAYS right". And so it goes at the New York Times. Not sure if readers of this blog are aware of this, but the New York Times is a publicly traded company on the NYSE under the symbol NYT. At the moment, the investment bank Morgan Stanley, which has a sizeable stake in NYT, is leading a shareholder revolt against the Sulzberger family and their confederates, who Morgan Stanley feel are inept and are running the newspaper, and as a result, the stock, into the ground. Additionally, NYT trades two sets of shares, an A and B set, in which one is a voting class for shareholders, and the other is not. The Sulzberger family owns the majority in one class, which they use to put their cronies and such into positions of power by vote, whereas the other class has no voting rights to say a thing. Morgan Stanley is looking to put an end to these dual classes so as to destroy the monopoly on management decisions that Arthur (Pinch) Sulzberger Jr. has at the moment. It is not an exaggeration to say that the New York Times has become a journalistic joke these last couple of years, specifically since the beginning of the W. era. No story that reveals state secrets is sacrosanct (witness James Risen's NSA story regarding warrantless wiretapping of international calls from domestic sources), nor is any story of dubious veracity halted before publication (witness the al Qaaqaa, Iraq story on the eve of the election in '04, which purported that the U.S. military had allowed intermediate range missles to be looted AFTER American troops had secured the surrounding area....a story which later turned out to be apocryphal). And so....the New York Times stock is tanking, down 50% from its 2000 highs to below 25, despite the powerful bull market we've witnessed starting in October of 2002. Here's an excerpt from the Journal about this story:

"Investors are increasing their bets that the slumping New York Times stock, which has plunged 25 percent in the past year, won't bounce back anytime soon.

Short sellers, who profit when a stock's price falls, increased their positions to 14.6 million shares in April. Short sellers held 14 million shares in March and just 6.4 million shares last April.

Yesterday, the stock closed at $24.24, down 6 cents or 0.25 percent. The stock has not been this low since October 1998.

The blossoming short selling in Times stock is a key sign that investors feel the newspaper titan and its boss, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, Jr., have done little to quell stockholder unrest that cropped up at its mid-April board meeting."

Allow me to be the first.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

Okay....got that piece of shadenfreud out of the way. Have to get Saturday started.