Photograph by Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo

Nicole Carty, 23, speaks during a meeting for participants of Zuccotti Park’s Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York.

Want to buy the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and six other daily newspapers? No, I don’t mean at the newsstand.

The Other 98%, a nonprofit organization, has setup a crowdfunding campaign to buy Tribune Co.’s newspaper business. The initiative is meant to prevent the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch or some other billionaire from buying it.

The campaign is looking to raise $660 million in the next 31 days so it can outbid the Kochs – the high-powered, libertarian brothers known for hosting $50,000-a-plate fundraising events for Republican candidates, according to the pitch on Indiegogo, a crowdfunding site. The group promoting the campaign was founded in 2010 with the mission “to kick corporate lobbyists out of DC,” according to its website.

In the case of the stop-the-Kochs campaign, the group doesn’t want “press freedom to be subject to the benevolence or non-benevolence of a billionaire,” according to Nicole Carty, one of the organization’s activists. “The press belongs to the people,” she said.

The newspapers were valued at $623 million last year, according to bankruptcy filings, making crowdfunding target of $660 million a competitive bid.

So far, $20,395 has been pledged. Only $659,979,605 to go.

Original post is Campaign to Buy Los Angeles Times Hopes to Crowdfund $660 Million by Tech Deals.

Presenting at the Deutsche Bank media conference in Palm Beach, Florida, Bewkes was asked about reports that one of his divisions, Time Inc., has entered into merger negotiations with magazine publisher Meredith Corp.

Bewkes responded, “The press is very active,” and followed that up by saying, “Who knows if they know what they’re talking about.”

For the record, Time Inc. publication Fortune Magazine broke the news about those merger discussions.

Who said print is dead?

Original post is Time Warner Boss Wonders If Press Knows What They’re Talking About — Including His Own Reporters by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Sipa via AP Images

Donald Trump is the latest billionaire interested in owning the New York Times.

Ridicule of Donald Trump has become an almost daily occurrence. This week, the mockery came after he was revealed to be the latest billionaire interested in owning the New York Times. Again, and again, and again.

New York Magazine’s Joe Hagan, who decided to break news on Trump’s interest in the newspaper, provided the all-important “to be sure” in his piece, saying that it’s unlikely the Sulzberger family, who controls the company, would welcome an offer from the blustering television host and Twitter taunt.

But who exactly is the family? And could a sale to Trump or any other buyer actually work?

A bit of background: The New York Times has been under the control of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan ever since Adolph Ochs acquired the paper in 1896. His descendants, very smartly, safeguarded their rule even after the company went public in the late ’60s by issuing two share classes — a Class A lot, which anyone can buy and is currently trading at around $9 each; and a Class B group, which no one can buy.

It’s the Class B shares that matter. Only these holders can elect the majority of the board, who in turn are charged with all the salient aspects of running the company, whether it’s selecting the CEO, approving acquisitions or deciding if investors should get a dividend quarter to quarter.

Class B folks elect 70 percent of the board, and Class A owners can only choose the remaining 30 percent, meaning the public shareholders are always in the minority. So should a billionaire buy up all the available shares on the market (worth around $1.3 billion at the moment), he or she would only be able to anoint 4 of the 14 directors on the board. A lot of skin to bear for very little say in the game.

While the B shares can’t be bought or sold, the bulk of the shares, or 90.3 percent to be precise, aren’t held by a particular Sulzberger heir but by an eight-member family trust. (The other 9.7 percent are held directly by some family members and a few former employees of the company — secretaries who were rewarded for their longstanding loyalty to the Sulzbergers.)

Those eight family members are forbidden from selling the trust’s holdings for the purposes of a merger or acquisition, “unless they determine that the primary objective of the trust can be achieved better by the sale,” according to company’s filings.

What’s the primary objective? Journalism, of course.

The Times Co., by that measure, is an unusual entity. Despite its desire for profitability, once you peel away at all that capitalist intent, it’s clear the genetic imperative, its stated goal, is to just create good journalism, profitable or not.

Unlike the Bancrofts, whose control of the Wall Street Journal was spread widely enough among squabbling family members to allow Rupert Murdoch to buy the company, the Sulzbergers’ power is concentrated in this small eight-person synod.

A smaller group also means there are fewer people to convince. In this case, any potential buyer of the New York Times would only have to sway six of the eight members to get control. The family elects the eight members every few years, and how they do so is not fully known.

For the moment, they are: James Cohen, who is listed by the company as simply self-employed; Joseph Perpich, who owns a medical services company; Gertrude Golden, an artist; Carolyn Greenspon, a psychotherapist; Steven Green, a partner at an investment firm; Hays Golden, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago; Michael Golden, vice chairman of the New York Times Co.; and Arthur Sulzberger, its chairman and publisher.

And despite all the lofty decrees around preserving what is one of the most important news organizations in the world, the family, like all other human beings, can also be motivated by cash.

The family used to reap a healthy dividend, drawing in as much as $20 million annually, that once served as a reliable subsidy for some family members who do not have high-paying careers. The last time they got that paycheck was in 2008, four years ago.

Original post is Why It’s Hard for Trump — or Anyone — to Buy the N.Y. Times by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Stefan Thomas/EPA

Google is trying to sniff out reporters to participate in its journalism fellowship program.

In discussions of the newspaper industry’s seemingly inevitable collapse, Google is probably most often cited as the reason why many people stopped paying for news. As the argument goes, why pay when you can find the information you need through a simple  search?

It’s a straightforward thesis that nonetheless glosses over any number of other forces that have chipped away at newspapers’ profits: Craigslist; the economy; advertiser confidence; oh, and, yeah, giving away the content for free.

While Google remains sensitive to those claims (as they have every right to be), recently the Internet giant tacitly acknowledged the profound effect it’s had on newspapers by unveiling a journalism fellowship. Yes, journalism. Google will pay, albeit a modest sum, for eight journalism students to learn about data-driven reporting starting in June.

“As a company dedicated to making the world’s information easily accessible, Google recognizes that behind many blue links is a journalist and that quality journalism is a key ingredient of a vibrant and functioning society,” the company said in its announcement about the fellowship.

Not only because of its reference to the blue-coded links that once colored an early era of the commercial Internet, the statement about the value of journalism feels like a delayed reaction. Had we heard this in the late 1990s, those words might have quelled concerns from more than a few nervous editors and media owners at the time.

Still, money is money, even if it is just a $7,500 stipend plus $1,000 in travel for a 10-week program. It starts at the Knight Foundation and ends with a week at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, where fellows will spend part of that week with the algo-heads at Google News and the rest of that time at YouTube.

To be eligible, applicants have to be enrolled in a university program and be a U.S. citizen. Deadline is Jan. 31, 2013. Go rake some muck.

Original post is Google to Fund — Wait for It — Journalism Fellowships by Tech Deals.