New York Times to Launch Staff Buyouts
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The New York Times (NYT) - Get Report will offer employees a voluntary buyout, the Newspaper Guild labor union said late Thursday, in another effort to save money as it struggles, like all newspapers, with the notion of doing business in a post-print world.
Times employees will also go back to full pay on Jan 1., 2010, according to a Guild memo to its membership. The newspaper publisher had cut staff salaries by 5% in March.
Union reps and Times management met earlier this week. The details of the buyout program -- who's eligible, what the payments will amount to, when it begins and ends, how many employees will be allowed to participate, etc. -- have yet to be worked out, the memo said. (We know the "where" and the "why.")
The Times has been in the news of late almost as much as its flagship paper covers it:
One of its three-largest shareholders cut its stake in the publisher earlier this week.
A strange snafu occurred last week when the company discovered that its board broke governance rules in over-compensating its top executives with stock options, forcing the company to admit the mistakes with the SEC.
The Boston Globe, owned by the Times since 1994, has been up for sale for months, with bidders reportedly dropping into and out of the process.
Newspaper stocks, meanwhile, have surged from their low-single-digit depths as advertising sales are stacking up to be slightly less terrifyingly bad than previous quarters.
And then, of course, early in 2009, there was Mexican billionaire Carlos Slims' emergency loan to the Times, which allowed the company to refinance its debt and buy it time.
Friday morning, Times shares were trading at $7.62, down 13 cents, on light volume.
The stock has surged 64% since early July, along with its print-news-organ peers. Gannett, for instance, has exploded, gaining 192% since July as investors shook off worries about the company's solvency.
-- Written by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
