It is hard to fool all of investors all of the time. The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) did succeed in fooling some investors over the course of the past several days as it laid off more than 100 workers at its flagship paper (although that and company are about the same after a series of divestitures). The cuts pressed the stock up from $11.22 to $13.08 over the course of two trading days. Shares had fallen back to $12.26 Tuesday morning, which is below the $12.36 where the stock traded a month ago.

Wall Street quickly realized what newspaper experts already knew. The revenue at the NY Times is unlikely to grow in future years, and probably will shrink. The trend of the past decade will persist. The erosion of print advertising and print subscriptions will not be replaced by digital advertising and online subscribers. There is actually a case to be made that digital ad revenue will drop as robots buy advertising to get marketers the best rates. Also, the growth of the number of people who will pay for the Times online has slowed and at some point will peak.

What all of this points to are more layoffs followed by more layoffs over the next several years. CEO-in-reality Arthur Sulzberger Jr. could dump his cousin, Michael Golden, and CEO-in-name only Mark Thompson. That would save the company something on the order of $7 million a year. This would not make employees cut in the future feel any better. It would, however, show that the executive suite is willing to make a gesture.

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