Why Bloomberg Won't Buy the New York Times

Newsweek and the NY Post are resuscitating one of the perennial rumors in medialand: that Mike Bloomberg will somehow end up buying the New York Times. If the Sulzberger family was amenable - and that's a big if - then Bloomberg could certainly afford it: the New York Times Company has an enterprise value of $3.7 billion, which is less than the value put on the 20% stake in Bloomberg LP held by Merrill Lynch. (The other 80% is owned by Mike Bloomberg personally.)

But the companies simply aren't much of a fit. Bloomberg makes money from subscriptions; the NYT makes money from selling advertising. Bloomberg's occasional toe-dips into consumer-facing media have never taken off, and even the highly-respected and enormous Bloomberg News operation is financially largely irrelevant to the fortunes of its parent. It's not there to make money, it's there to give Bloomberg a bit more credibility, and to be one more way in which Bloomberg's clients get better content than anyone else. Certainly Bloomberg has very little interest in non-subscribers reading its content, which is one reason the Bloomberg website is so atrocious.

More to the point, Mike Bloomberg personally is not, and never has been, a newspaperman. If he were to get into a serious battle with Rupert Murdoch, then he would likely lose, just because that's what happens to people who get into a battle with Rupert Murdoch.

I also suspect that Mike Bloomberg likes having the option to sell Bloomberg LP - something which would, if it ever happened, allow him to ratchet up his philanthropy to a whole new level. If he bought the New York Times, the Sulzbergers would want assurances that he wouldn't simply turn around and sell it as part of the combined company.

I've joshed in the past that the best owner for the New York Times would be Google.org. That almost certainly won't happen. But my main point there stands: it doesn't make sense for the Times to be owned by any entity with shareholders who agitate for maximized profits. Maybe Bloomberg's new charitable foundation might consider buying the Times, although I wouldn't recommend it. But Bloomberg LP? No.

Comments

[CrossProfit]

"More to the point, Mike Bloomberg personally is not, and never has been, a newspaperman."
AND
"I've joshed in the past that the best owner for the New York Times would be Google.org."

If Google ever tried the newspaper business they would be searching and indexing yesterday's news while Murdoch et al would send them yesterday's cache for the archive!

Google Earth to Felix,
It's time to come in for a landing!

CrossProfit

[drmalaka]

The only people who would buy the NY Times are those who need to put paper at the bottom of their bird cage.

A horrible industry. A horrible company. Terrible Managment. Overpaid and too many employees. Declining advertising. Declining circulation. Declining relevance.

Every day that goes buy the goodwill of the Times goes down even further. How much longer will they be the paper of record? Large portions of this country could care less what the Times writes about, eventually they will only appeal to the 10% lunatic progressives. Not a good plan.