New York Times Co reports 3Q loss
NEW YORK, United States — The New York Times Co reported a small loss for the third quarter on Tuesday, hurt by one-time expenses and another drop in print advertising revenue.
The publisher of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald-Tribune and 15 other daily newspapers has been trying to offset declines in its traditional newspaper business with revenue from its Web operations. But a jump in online ad dollars was not enough to offset declines in print.
The Times Co. said it expects print advertising in the last three months of the year to improve “modestly” from the third quarter but did not offer specifics.
Its stock fell 11 cents, or 1.4 per cent, to US$7.93 in morning trading yesterday.
The company reported a net loss of US$4.3 million, or three cents per share, for the July-September quarter. That’s better than the net loss of US$35.6 million, or 25 cents per share, a year ago, a figure that included bigger one-time expenses.
Excluding severance costs and accounting adjustments, the company would have earned seven cents per share in the most recent quarter, down from an adjusted figure of 16 cents a year ago.
Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of five cents per share, excluding unusual items.
Revenue slipped 2.7 percent to US$554.3 million from US$569.5 million a year ago. Analysts expected US$560.3 million.
While digital ad sales, including results from About.com, jumped 15 per cent to US$78.3 million, print sales slipped almost six per cent to roughly US$209 million. Circulation revenue, which accounts for subscription fees and newsstand sales, fell five per cent to US$229.1 million.
In a statement, Times Co CEO Janet Robinson offered an update on the company’s progress developing a system to charge readers for full access to the flagship newspaper’s website, one of the digital initiatives it hopes will start to pay off in extra online revenue.
She said the company has decided that readers who are referred to Times articles from blogs and other third-party sites will not trigger the mechanism that tracks how many articles online readers view. Beyond a certain number, readers will be asked to pay a monthly fee beginning next year.
