The New York Times is a business. It is publicly traded. Publicly traded companies are under enormous pressure to provide a return to their owners, the stockholders. If you had invested in the Times in 1986, right now you would have doubled your money. That is a dreadful performance. By comparison, if you had purchased a NASDAQ index fund, with low expenses and relatively low risk - far lower than owning a single stock - your money would have made increased four hundred percent. Had you purchased an index fund which followed the Dow, you would have also earned four hundred percent. If you were unlucky enough to purchase stock in the Times back when the market was supposed to have hit rock bottom in late 2001, 2002, you would have lost more than a third of your investment as of the close of business today.

I'm left wondering how the stockholders of this company must feel right now. I guess they feel pretty bad. The next shareholder meeting most likely will not be very pretty. I expect some heads to roll. No matter how a business views itself - and in the Times case, they view themselves as some sort of American institution - it simply must provide a return to investors. If it does not, it is sure to be "re-invented" by the people whose money it is using.