Say Anything Blog

Well, when you run a company that is crumbling beneath your feet and you have to acknowledge facts like this........

There’s trouble all around for the New York Times — the paper has announced a hiring freeze and has cut staffers while its stock takes a beating on Wall Street.

In a memo sent to employees on Wednesday, the Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller stated: “As we approach 2008, it is clear that the newsroom is going to have to do even more to tighten spending, and to help the publisher and the Times Company meet the difficult financial challenges facing our industry.”

The paper is eliminating about a dozen support positions and trimming “a number of” clerical and secretarial jobs, according to the memo obtained by Reuters.

Keller also told employees: “We put into place a hiring freeze several weeks ago, and except for those jobs that are critically important to our future ambitions, we will be trying to fill [the fired workers’] positions internally.”

Also on Wednesday, an analyst with Banc of America Securities downgraded shares of the newspaper’s parent, the New York Times Co., lowering its rating from “neutral” to “sell.”

Analyst Joe Arns said the company is his least favorite in the newspaper publishing sector, and lowered his target price on the stock from $21 to $14.

......then any manager with a whiff of a survival instinct and that has to explain why the company he’s running is starting to circle the bowl will come up with excuses like this:

Arns estimated that ad revenue in the newspaper industry will likely drop 9 percent next year as a collapse in the housing market and a hiring slowdown reduce the demand for classified advertising.

He also stated that luxury advertising, which accounts for almost a third of the Times’ national ad revenue, could drop if the U.S. experiences a recession.

A slowdown in financial services spending could hurt the company as well, according to Arns, because about half of its revenue comes from business centers New York and Boston.

Of course, it doesn’t occur to them that their constant anti-American propaganda may have left a very sour taste in a lot of people’s mouth and that doesn’t go well with morning coffee. There is a REAL good chance that their product isn’t selling because more and more people simply....don’t.....want.....it. And with other sources available now, people aren’t buying it.

In any other corporation a CEO would be hauled up before a board and asked just what in the sam hill is going on. Fix it, and fix it now. Or go away. Simple. Have a nice day.

But that won’t happen here because the NYT is so ideologically driven that they cannot possibly believe that it’s anything they’re doing. It has to be the economy. And therefore, it’s Bush’s fault.

It’s worked for them so far.