The Times recently announced plans to mortgage its headquarters to ease its cash-flow problems, but with its share price closing today at $7.38 [1], down 85% from its historic trading high of $51.50 in 2002, the company isn't out of danger.
Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff went on CNBC today and brought up the name of a potential savior that would be welcomed as warmly by the Times' liberal staffers as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and not merely Pestilence, either.(Hat-tip Mark Finkelstein [2]of NewsBusters, whose vision of Fox personalities bossing around Times journalists is amusing.)
Michael Wolff: I think that everybody is looking at [the New York Times] and waiting for it to kind of go over a brink, to run out of cash, which they're in the process of doing. Or to find itself in a situation where actually, and this is really the key thing, they go looking for a buyer.
Wolff,author of a new book on Fox News owner and all-around media mogul Rupert Murdoch, said later in the segment:
Wolff: I think Rupert Murdoch would love the New York Times.I mean, that is finally the capper of his career.I think that's what he wants,I believe that's what he will get. But all that's true about the newspaper business, but you have to add to it price. At some price the New York Times becomes actually a very enviable buy.And we're getting to that price.
You can watch the exchange on CNBC [3].