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 […]

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 […]

If you want to know why the controlling Bancroft family should approve the sale of Dow Jones & Co. to Rupert Murdoch for $5 billion, just read Crawford Hill’s long letter to his relatives late last week.
In it, the grandson of family matriarch Jessie Bancroft Cox, says the family should take the money and run, […]