I found a Sunday New York Times!

Yesterday night I went to pick up a friend at the airport. I love that place. It is just so fascinating. You can watch planes taxi and take off, you can get Timmys or a Starbucks and just people watch. My friend's plane was a little late so I walked around to see what I could discover. It was pretty quiet and I turned a corner and found this:


A current edition of the New York Times! I know the non-news crowd will not appreciate the find but all of those who do understand - cool eh? Anyway, I have been thinking about the Times lately as Selena and I were in New York and saw the huge building the Times had just recently moved in to right before our visit. But the Grey Lady, (as the Times is nicknamed in reference to its tradition of presenting many words and few pictures-thanks Wikipedia), has been having quite a hard time even before the economy tanked. In recent years, the Times has been through such things as a scandal where their editor had to resign when a reporter, Jayson Blair, just made up news stories and quoted people he never interviewed. Ouch. That just isn't supposed to happen at a paper as legendary as the Times. The Times, once the standard in journalism, has seen it's circulation drop and also its market value. Just how bad are things at the NYT? Take a look at this:
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Take a look at the price of the Sunday edition. $5.00. What is the New York Times stock trading at these days? It closed trading today at $3.90. So a Sunday New York Times is worth more than one share of its stock. Wow. I had heard or read that somewhere so it's cool (for me) to see that fact literally in black and white. On March 12th, 2004, the Times stock closed at $45.32.

Today I read on the web from Yahoo Finance via The Drudge Report:

New York Times raises another $225M in office sale

New York Times raises another $225M by selling headquarters, giving publisher bigger cushion

Monday March 9, 2009, 4:50 pm EDT

NEW YORK (AP) -- The New York Times Co. has sold most of its home office for $225 million, padding the newspaper publisher's financial cushion amid a sharp drop in revenue that has forced management to scrounge for more money.
The deal announced Monday covers 21 of the building's 52 floors. That space, about 750,000 square feet (69,676 sq. meters), became the Times' headquarters when the midtown Manhattan offices opened in 2007.

How the mighty have fallen.