The stock of The New York Times Co. hit a 10-year low Wednesday as one of its major institutional holders unloaded shares.
At the close of trading the dividend yield on NYT was 4.98 percent, according to Google Finance. You can’t get rates like that for savings at many banks or money funds.
And the Times wasn’t […]

If anyone thinks the spin-off-the-newspapers strategy will save the business, they need to read McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt’s sobering assessment yesterday of his company’s prospects.
Once the ailing industry’s biggest cheerleader, Pruitt said in a statement that he didn’t know when the downturn would end. His remarks came as McClatchy announced continuing revenue declines and said […]

Two weeks ago on Muckety.com, we wrote that Hearst Corp. needed a re-write of its script to buy the small piece of Hearst-Argyle Television that it didn’t already own.
Maybe that’s happening.
Friday, privately held Hearst let its buyout offer expire and said it was returning all shares that had been tendered.
One person who could be relieved […]

It’s one thing to have some shareholders, bloggers and newspaper reporters after you.
But it’s quite another when a featured columnist on The New York Times op-ed page takes aim.
Under the headline “Enron’s second Coming?” Paul Krugman lambasted Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo Monday, saying that a big lesson from the “housing mess” is that the […]

Still having trouble getting your head around a $10 billion valuation for Facebook?
Try this. Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking company has roughly 300 employees, according to The Wall Street Journal. So, $10 billion works out to $33 million per employee.
Gannett, the nation’s largest owner of newspapers, including USA Today, has a market cap of about $10 […]

In a business where credibility means everything, finally some sanity in the Par Ridder case.
Previously, Ridder’s bosses have backed him, even after he admitted stealing proprietary information when he jumped as publisher from the Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune in Minnesota.
Earlier this week, a judge banned Ridder from his job at the Star Tribune […]

That’s what Fortune magazine’s Allan Sloan speculates in a piece about the real reason the Bancrofts sold Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal to Murdoch.

“Rupert has tried to ensure family control by, among other things, having News Corp. spend $11 billion (with shareholder approval) to buy out the big stake held by John Malone’s Liberty Media,” Sloan writes.

Bill Gates still says he is stepping away from the operations of Microsoft next year, as planned. But his competitive fire hasn’t dimmed.
He didn’t miss an opportunity to gig Google in a recent interview with John Markoff of The New York Times.
“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many […]