After reporting losses in costs and a big drop in advertising sales, the New York Times is considering cutting its dividend, Bloomberg reported today. This is bad news for the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, since, as New York’s Joe Hagan wrote earlier this month, the dividend, which provides the family with around $25 million quarterly, is the prime source of their wealth. “If they make a serious cut to the dividend, which I suspect they will, that will negatively impact the stock price and that will negatively impact cash flow among the Ochs-Sulzberger families,” an analyst confirmed to Bloomberg today. Which could therefore make the paper more vulnerable to a sale: If the Sulzbergers are suddenly unable to keep up their lifestyles of globe-trotting and mountain-music-making, they might be all the more open to entreaties from the Rupert Murdochs of the world.
New York Times Considers Cutting Dividend, Posts Loss (Update2) [Bloomberg]
