New York Times Won’t Be Sold or Split, Chairman Says (Update2)
March 11, 2010, 4:16 PM EST(Updates share price in final paragraph.)
By Greg Bensinger
March 11 (Bloomberg) -- New York Times Co. won’t be sold or split apart and the company is “delighted” to have billionaire Carlos Slim as an investor, Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said.
Slim “is a quality investor,” Sulzberger said today at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit in New York. “He has invested because he believes in our mission and he believes in the quality of what we do and that his shares will in fact rise.”
The publisher sought financing from Slim, the world’s richest man according to Forbes magazine, as advertising sales and circulation declined. The billionaire provided Times Co. with $250 million in loans in January 2009. He owned about 7 percent of the Class A shares as of Feb. 20, and warrants to buy enough stock to give him control of 16 percent of the stock.
To add sources of revenue, the New York Times is studying how to charge online readers under a plan announced in January. Visitors to the site who aren’t print subscribers will have to pay a fee for access beyond a limited number of articles.
“There is an opportunity for a great deal of revenue,” from NYTimes.com, Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson said today in New York. The details of the paid Web site haven’t yet been determined, she said.
Times Co., based in New York, lost 17 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $11.52 at 4:02 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares declined 6.8 percent this year.
--Editors: Cécile Daurat, Andrew Dunn
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jennifer Sondag at jsondag@bloomberg.net
