(American Thinker) - New York Times Company's reported financial results, outlook, and stock price keep getting hammered by poor business performance.
The prospects are grim. The newspaper industry is in serious trouble. But the Times faces a special challenge in the arrival of Rupert Murdoch as new owner of the Wall Street Journal, not to mention any further problems which might grow out of the MoveOn ad scandal and the regulatory risks associated with the Federal Election Commission and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Rupert is all about top line growth. Pinch is reduced to selling off valuable assets and hollowing out his core business with drastic expense cuts just to pay the current dividend!
If I were a betting man I would take Murdoch over Pinch any day of the week. Pinch inherited the New York Times, a global icon in newspaper publishing. Murdoch inherited a tiny paper called the Barrier Miner, in Broken Hill, New South Wales, (2000 population: 21,000), and Southdown Press, a small publisher of American comic books. While not nothing, it is an awfully humble beginning compared to Pinch.
All told, the Murdoch's companies were probably worth at most a few hundred thousand US$ or so when he took control of them. Today, the News Corp. market cap is $68.82 billion, while the Times is $2.89 billion. News Corp., in other words, has a market cap almost 24 times as much as the New York Times.
It's as if Pinch left England on the QE2 and washed up in New York harbor in a lifeboat, while Murdoch left Austrailia in a rowboat and sailed into NewYork commanding the Seventh fleet. More...
I didn't know that News Corp. had such humble beginnings.
