As Arthur Sulzberger Jr. planned to tell shareholders today at the New York Times Company’s annual meeting, investors in the company have known all along that it has a two-class voting structure. That structure protects the company from being forced to sell a la Tribune or Knight-Ridder; it also keeps shareholders in the larger but less powerful group from having much influence and some of them are quite unhappy. Naysayer-in-chief Hassan Elmasry — a Morgan Stanley portfolio manager whose issues with the NYT’s management and the stock structure have been well chronicled and highly publicized — was joined by enough shareholders or proxy holders to withhold a symbolic 42 percent of the vote for directors at the meeting.
In prepared remarks filed with the SEC before being delivered at the meeting, Sulzberger said the directors up for election or re-election today all have agreed to serve. From the text:
— “We are well aware of the tremendous dislocations and challenges the digital world has created for us and for all in our industry, most obviously in our financial performance. Even as we see strong digital revenue growth, we continue to see declines in our print revenue. To address this, we have been dramatically reducing our cost structure, efforts that will be ongoing.
All of these industry-wide changes are reflected in a stock price that makes none of us happy
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