The New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT) entered this decade with over a billion dollars in surplus, but that was before the commercialization of the Internet as a mass media. Today, it seems more than apparent that the Gray Lady squandered its opportunity to spend that money to diversify the newspaper company's revenue stream into the nascent medium.
Mark Bowden, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, said on WNYC radio on Wednesday that the Times could have used its pot of money:
to acquire Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), or Amazon Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) when none of these companies were household names
to pursue an online venture similar to Craigslist
to take advantage of its brand name and invest in cable news similar to CNN to showcase its journalists
Those moves would have certainly put the New York Times in a stronger position than it is in today. Instead, the Times is languishing in debt, relying on declining advertising because it decided to invest in newspapers such as the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion, which reportedly is now worth a fraction of what the company originally paid in 1993. The Times has threatened to close the Globe unless it drastically gets the costs concessions from unions at the Boston paper.
However, had the Times followed Bowden's suggestions, there is no guarantee that Amazon, Google or Yahoo! would have ever become household names under Times stewardship. - Gerald Magpily
The New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT) entered this decade with over a billion dollars in surplus, but that was before the commercialization of the Internet as a mass media. Today, it seems more than apparent that the Gray Lady squandered its opportunity to spend that money to diversify the newspaper company's revenue stream into the nascent medium. 
