In a Pinch

The New York Times corporation, which includes the International Herald Tribune, the Times, Boston Globe, and several other papers, took yet another hit when they released their earnings (or what's left of them). Revenues were down drastically and the company posted a loss.

The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York Times, posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter — one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen — falling far short of both analysts’ expectations and its $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier.

The company did break even on a per-share basis, compared with the average analyst forecast of earnings of 14 cents, down from 17 cents in the first quarter of 2007.

The company’s main source of revenue, newspaper advertising in print and online, fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory, as the industry suffers the twin blows of an economic downturn and the continuing long-term shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

In a conference call with analysts, Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive, said it was “a challenging quarter, one that showed the effects of a weaker economy,” compounded by “a marketplace that has been reconfigured technologically, economically and geographically.”

There are many ways to approach this.

I could go for the humorous - Pinch Sulzberger is simply doing his part to reduce carbon emissions by going for negative growth in the hopes that other papers follow suit.

I could go for the real estate angle - the Times isn't a newspaper company, but a real estate company that happens to sell newspapers to zero out its revenues.

I could go for the serious - that the NYT editorial slant has made folks uncomfortable putting their ad money into the paper lest they be seen supporting the Times' agenda. Either that, or there were serious management missteps that have resulted in exacerbating an already weak ad market.

There have also been rumblings that there will be yet another round of layoffs in the newsroom because of plummeting revenues, which will only compound the problems at the paper since the quality of the product will only suffer (what's left of it, that is).

In any event, the Times continues to hemorrhage money under Sulzberger's run as the head of the paper, and NYT shareholders who don't have much of a say in how the company is run ought to be reconsidering keeping their money in NYT stock unless they're willing to watch their share value continue heading towards zero.

UPDATE:
And you can't simply pin this all on the slowing economy because the Times ad revenues fell greater than the industry average. That and Google posted big gains despite the ad market slowdown. So, the problems aren't external, but caused by internal issues - namely Pinch and his crew.

Google won back Wall Street with first-quarter earnings and revenue growth that surpassed analysts' predictions, propelled by an aggressive push outside the United States.

The pleasant surprise, delivered late Thursday, lifted Google's recently sagging shares by nearly 17 percent, or $75.89, to $525.43 at the open of trade Friday.

"This is mostly a relief rally," Stanford Group analyst Clayton Moran said. "People are relieved that things aren't as bad as they thought."

The stock still has a long way to go to fully recover the $75 billion in shareholder wealth that evaporated as economic worries caused Google's market value to plunge by 35 percent since December. That left the company's shares at $449.54 at the end of Thursday's regular trading.

Google's performance indicates the Internet's advertising market -- expected to generate $44 billion in worldwide spending this year -- remains robust, especially outside the United States. Powered by its popular search engine, Google has built the Internet's most lucrative ad network.