Photographer: Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg

The logo for SFR, a mobile-phone unit of Vivendi SA, sits on a giant display screen at one of the company’s stores in Paris, France.

In its unlikely transformation from a regional water utility into Europe’s biggest telecom and media conglomerate, Vivendi has ridden a lot of corporate trends. It may be on the verge of adding another to the list: the spinoff. Vivendi is considering getting rid of its biggest unit, French mobile provider SFR, according to people familiar with the situation. That would let it focus on faster-growing media businesses like Canal Plus, its pay-TV arm, and Universal Music Group (home to the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber).

If this all sounds familiar to Vivendi-watchers, that’s because it is. A year ago, the company started exploring a break-up, with telecom assets (increasingly out of fashion as smartphone penetration plateaus) on one side, and zippier media properties on the other. After boardroom infighting that led to the ouster of then-Chief Executive Officer Jean-Bernard Levy, the plan was shelved in favor of seeking buyers for assets like GVT, a Brazilian broadband provider, and Activision Blizzard, which publishes blockbuster video games like “Call of Duty.”

Problem is, Vivendi hasn’t managed to find a taker for either at a price it’s willing to accept, so it’s back to square one. Splitting off SFR has obvious appeal. Vivendi could load the slow-growing but reasonably profitable phone group with most of its debt, leaving the media side almost debt-free. And doing so would put an end to a corporate structure that investors have always found a bit odd. But given last year’s misfires, they shouldn’t expect any immediate change.

Original post is Vivendi Goes Back to Future With SFR Spinoff Plan 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.

Courtesy of Gabe Rivera

Founder Gabe Rivera said he would 'hate to see Techmeme wither or die inside a bigger company.'

This is the fifth in a five-part series called “No VC,” which highlights startups that have succeeded without venture capital, the lifeblood of Silicon Valley.

Gabe Rivera often hears from Silicon Valley’s elite, who are eager to invest in his startup Techmeme, the favorite news website of technology industry insiders. But many of them, such as SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, don’t get very far.

“The first time I asked Gabe if he would be interested in an angel investment,” said Clavier, “he replied something like: ‘I don’t want to deal with the obligations attached to raising money, and I still want to be able to take a nap after lunch.’”

Rivera created the site in 2005, when blogs and news outlets tracking the daily gyrations of technology giants began pouring a greater amount of content onto the Web. Techmeme collected the day’s most important headlines in one place, grouping together similar posts from different sites and constantly scanning for fresh news. Rivera had left his programming job at Intel and supported the new website and himself with $55,000 in personal savings. In 2006, he began selling ads and began growing his team.

Techmeme, which Rivera calls a “scrappy” operation, now has a staff of 12 who mostly work from his San Francisco apartment or their own homes. While the algorithm for sifting news has improved and Rivera has hired human editors to find stories the machines miss, the site looks almost identical to the way it did six years ago.

Reluctant to make revenue a priority over user experience, Rivera has resisted selling large-format graphical ads in favor of smaller promotions targeted at the industry Techmeme covers, including sponsored blog posts, help-wanted ads and announcements about upcoming events. Rivera declined to say how much the site makes, but said it covers the cost of labor, servers and everything else, “with a little left over.” Sales are at least $1 million, based on ad rates posted on the site.

However much money Techmeme makes now, it’s no secret that the potential is much greater. Rivera has turned down acquisition offers from major Internet players because he would “hate to see Techmeme wither or die inside a bigger company, and I’d hate to see our team get bogged down building another company’s doomed product,” he said. Investors approach Rivera about once a month. He tells them he doesn’t need the money and that they wouldn’t be patient enough to support the company he hopes to build.

“We’re still exploring what the product and revenue model is at a very fundamental level, and raising money too early in this process wouldn’t make sense,” said Rivera, 39. “It’s true that in many ways, more money would make many things easier, including hiring more good people. But I’m also concerned about what it might make not possible: patience in letting a product mature, or forgoing costly distractions like board meetings and fundraising.”

Clavier and other investors who have befriended Rivera over the years have stopped pestering him because they acknowledge his approach wouldn’t work for venture capital.

“The genuine question when you raise funding is how it allows one to grow faster, larger and more valuable,” Clavier said. “It seemed to me that Gabe was not clear that funding would get him there anyway.”

Mark Suster, an investor at GRP Partners in Los Angeles, reads Techmeme every morning and has also discussed funding with Rivera. While Suster admires the entrepreneur for his independent approach, he said that’s also what would make Techmeme a poor investment.

“Gabe is not the guy a VC would invest in,” Suster said. “I’m trying to find the guy who can say, ‘I want to change the world and have the biggest company possible.’ That’s who I need to finance. History would not suggest that he’s that guy.”

Still, Rivera continues growing the business at his own pace. He has built and staffed a separate site that aggregates media news, Mediagazer, and expects to do the same for other news-driven topics.

“I don’t believe anyone aiming to build the ‘biggest company possible’ could have made something like Techmeme,” said Rivera. “Any such person working on something remotely similar to Techmeme would instead focus on how to reach tens of millions of users as quickly as possible, and as a result, the relevance of the product for a community as focused as Techmeme’s would suffer.”

Plus, growing too quickly might get in the way of the naps Rivera takes after lunch almost every day.

“My naps are important,” he says. “We should all nap more.”

Original post is No VC: Why Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera Resists Investors by Tech Deals.