Here’s the NYT stock chart for the last five years.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NYT#chart1:symbol=nyt;range=5y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Two-thirds of the company’s market capitalization has been pissed away in that time, and the rate of decline is accelerating. At this rate, which seems inevitable if present management remains in place, the firm should be delisted sometime in 2011 or 12.

Contrary to Mr Ettorre’s assertions, stockholders do matter. (Never had to make a payroll, have ya, kid?) For a public company, stockholders are the owners and the vital source of capital for expansion and (in a downturn) operations, and they seldom do it out of ideological affinity. I would expect that even Mr Ettore would not be happy to hear that his pension fund invested in NYT in 2004, and two-thirds of his retirement savings have been erased by Sulzberger’s ineptitude.

Again, the management has neither a plan, nor the skills, to stabilize the decline, let alone earn that value back. It’s gone and the rest of it is going, too. If your pension fund is in NYT you will not be able to buy a paper in retirement, unless it’s a few days old and wrapped around a herring which is also a few days old. And the paper then will not be the NYT, because it will have ceased operations when Pinch ran it out of capital.

Analysts, by the way, expect the Times to lose another $3 per share of shareholder value in the next twelve months. Since the shares are only at $15, that’s another 20%; that loss of capitalization means that layoffs and so forth (this week, at IHT) will continue. It’s unfortunate because along with the Times’s senior management and its fabulating reporters, a lot of tech people, press workers, delivery men and so forth will lose their jobs, and they’ll probably find their jobs harder to replace than the hacks. The writers will all get jobs shuffling paper in the Obama Administration’s final solution to the health care problem. Competence is never tested when you’re applying to the government.

As far as the Times’s glitzy new HQ building is concerned, read this.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/firms-buy-ritzy-headquarters-buildings/story.aspx?guid=%7BDCDFFA03%2DEA1D%2D4044%2D8836%2DCBAA9133764B%7D&siteid=yhoof

“Operated as a public trust,” my foot. No, operated as a very, very badly run for-profit enterprise.