Tag Results for The New York Times Co.

Boston Globe publisher Steven Ainsley refused to rule out futher job cuts during a meeting with employees this morning. a member of the Globe's largest union said today.

Executives called the meeting to explain how the paper will move forward after yesterday's decision by the New York Times Company not to sell the newspaper. Reporter Scott Allen, a member of the Newspaper Guild, said the publisher was asked for reassurance on job security by employees who have already seen their salaries cut, their health insurance premiums increased, and their employer pension plan contributions eliminated.

"Steve Ainsley, the publisher, was asked directly: 'Can you reassure us that there won't be layoffs?' " said Allen, who attended the 11 a.m. town hall style meeting at the newspaper's Morrissey Boulevard headquarters. "And he said absolutely not."

Allen said the main speaker at the meeting was Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson, who thanked the employees for the sacrifices they have made. Robinson said that cost-cutting and revenue-enhancing measures like the recent subscription price increase have allowed the Globe's finances to improve to the point where the Times wasn't compelled to sell, Allen said.

Other than that, however, Robinson had little reassuring to offer, he said.

"Today the message was: Conditions have improved, the paper is improving, we see a strong future here but we're not in the black yet and it's too soon to talk about making right what happened to you folks this year," Allen said.

"I think people probably came away from that meeting feeling like well, we know who our owner is, but we don't see any improvement in our working conditions for some time to come."

Friday was deadline day for bidders seeking to make an offer to buy the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from the New York Times Co. And it appears there’s not much to report.

New York Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes that it’s not even clear whether the two contenders for the Globe, a group led by former Globe executive Stephen Taylor and California-based Platinum Equity, had submitted bids.

Each had reportedly offered to pay $35 million as well as assume pension liabilities of $59 million. Jessica Heslam had reported in the Boston Herald that the estimate of those liabilities had recently been revised upward to $115 million. Pérez-Peña quotes sources who confirm the upward revision, but suggest the error was not quite as great as that.

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If Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Janet Robinson are the royalty of the New York Times empire, then Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute is fast becoming the little boy who points out the emperor and the empress have no clothes.

Earlier this year, it was Edmonds - Poynter's Media Business Analyst - who bared the truth that the supposed $85 million the Times said the Globe would lose this year was a dubious figure likely padded out by paper losses in addition to real ones. At the time, the Times was negotiating with the Newspaper Guild over $10 million in givebacks, which it eventually won. OK, so Edmonds' story didn't save the Globe's unionized workforce much heartache, but hey, at least they had the satisfaction of knowing they were being scammed instead of just suspecting.

Now Edmonds has taken aim at Sulzberger and Robinson's latest bit of malarky: Their insistence that they are in no hurry to sell the Globe.

In his latest column on Poynter Online, Edmonds writes that tax considerations could be pushing the Times to sell the Globe by the end of the year. The Times' asset-dumping ways - it sold WQXR-FM for $45 million this summer and is expectecd to get rid of its 17 percent share of the Red Sox for a tidy profit as well - carry some serious tax considerations, he writes. That means writing off the huge losses the paper will incur from selling the Globe will come in handy on the other side of tax ledger.

If Edmonds is right, that means that the two surviving bidders for the Globe (Platinum Equity and the Taylor family) may have some additional leverage in forcing a quicker, cheaper sale from the Times.

File under: All the news that gives the Times fits.