¿La última pelea del NYT?

Este es un artículo que dejaría muy contento a los detractores que el NYT ganó en Chile luego de sus puntiagudas columnas: la de los antibióticos en los salmones y la que defendía a la Patagonia de las centrales en el Baker y el Pascua. A pesar de los altos niveles de rentabilidad que sigue marcando los estados financieros del diario estadounidense, su nivel de vulnerabilidad es el más alto de su historias. Su precio en bolsa bajó de de US$7 billones en 2002 a sólo 2,8 billones el año pasado y las proyecciones de los inversionistas en Wall Street no son alentadoras. Si se considera que Murdoch pagó US$4, 5 por el Wall Street Journal no es difícil anticipar que el NYT pronto quedará a tiro de cañón. Esto a pesar de los esfuerzos de la familia Sulzberger -una de las pocas que se mantiene al mando de un periódico importante- por modernizar el diario y adecuarlos a las necesidades de los usuarios. Sin embargo, la publicidad va en retirada y internet no cubre aún los gastos de un diario, lo que pone en duda la capacidad de los Sulzberger de mantener el control del diario a pesar de ser mayoría en la mesa directiva. Las posibilidades que se plantean está desde el ingreso a la propiedad de Warren Buffett hasta el peor escenario: la arremetida de Murdoch. Tal como es de suponer, el establishment político jugará un rol tan importante como los Sulzberger en el futuro del NYT. O mayor. El siguiente es un artículo de Vanity Fair.

Por Michael Wolff
Artículo NYT

Happy newspaper families are alike, and, it seems, unhappy newspaper families are alike, too: in the end they all lose their papers.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. atop shields of the vanquished. Photo illustration by John Corbitt; by Luiz C. Ribeiro/Rex Features (Sulzberger).
The Sulzbergers of The New York Times, along with the Grahams of The Washington Post and, until recently, the Bancrofts of The Wall Street Journal, have been among the most peaceable, stalwart, and worthy newspaper families of the ages, marrying the salubriousness of wealth and prestige with the virtues of enlightened ownership. What’s more, the Sulzbergers pioneered a historic family-and-corporate-ownership structure which was, in theory, next to impossible for an unwelcome outsider to mess with.

Nevertheless, two years ago, Hassan Elmasry, a former night-school business student working as a portfolio manager in the London office of Morgan Stanley, began a concerted campaign of shareholder activism against the Times, demanding, among other things, an end to the inequitable dual-share structure on which it bases its independence—i.e., the Sulzberger family, owning less than 20 percent of the company, controls a 70 percent voting majority. His efforts resulted in focusing attention on the Times’s declining business and helped prod the company to raise cash by disposing of its nine television stations. Still, Elmasry’s campaign was quixotic: he was asking the beneficiaries of the dual-class structure (the Sulzbergers’ Class B shares with majority voting rights versus everyone else’s Class A shares with limited rights) to declare their own obsolescence. While, in two annual meetings of discontent, Elmasry managed to get as much as 42 percent of the Times’s shareholders to vote with him—a majority of non-Sulzberger shareholders and a whopping sign of corporate unfriendliness—the Sulzberger family, as the legal structure put in place in 1968 was designed to enable them not to do, wasn’t budging (however grim and uncomfortable they might have seemed). Hence, in October 2007, Morgan Stanley gave up its campaign, sold its position, and, with some sheepishness—confirming the general “What were they thinking?” sense among Wall Street professionals—walked away.