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Media

The Wrong Way To Fix The New York Times (NYT)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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empire1The New York Times (NYT) suspended its dividend. That says a lot about what it sees as it looks out of the next quarter.  Print and online advertising must be getting much worse than last year.

Less than four months ago, the Times lowered the dividend from 23 cents to 6 cents.  So the publisher is giving up on sending money to shareholders, including the founding Sulzberger family.

Cutting the dividend is not going to do much.  Selling off or closing divisions that are dragging the company down will.  The New York Times needs to rid itself of its regional newspapers including The Boston Globe, even if it has to shut them down.

In the fourth quarter of last year, revenue at the firm’s New England Media Group fell 15%. Experts think that The Boston Globe loses $1 million a week.  The parent company has to make up for that. Killing the Globe would make up for a lot more than the last dividend cut.

The company’s Regional Newspaper Group is made up of a number of small dailies and weeklies. Revenue in that division dropped 16% last quarter. The papers in the group need to be auctioned off or shuttered.

The New York Times newspaper may well be saved. It cannot be with the anchors of the other properties.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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