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Dec 9 2008 5:03PM EST

NYT Co. Execs Under Fire at UBS Conference

If you're a New York Times Co. executive -- or any newspaper executive, really -- now is not the time you want to be fielding questions from a roomful of banking types. Not without a flak jacket, anyway.

Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson and CFO Jim Follo took the stage at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference this afternoon, and the questions they received bordered on downright confrontational.

One audience member wanted to know why the company, which slashed its dividend by nearly 75 percent a few weeks ago, didn't go further. "Why keep the dividend at all?" he demanded. "The notion that cash is flowing out of the company to equity -- it seems like you might not understand the gravity of the situation."

"We still continue to be profitable," Follo responded, adding that the new dividend of 6 cents a share strikes "the right balance between maintaining financial stability and returning cash to shareholders," in the company's view.

Of course, "shareholders" primarily means Sulzberger family members, whose cohesion is seen by some as critical to their continued ownership of the paper. Another audience member wondered how much longer it will be until the Sulzbergers sell out. "The family has made it very clear internally and externally that they have no intention of selling the company," Robinson replied. "They believe in the capital structure of the company as it exists right now."

But there wasn't much in her presentation to suggest the Times Co.'s fortunes will improve anytime soon. The brightest news involved sales of the Nov. 5 edition and related products commemorating Barack Obama's election. Altogether, it generated $1.7 million in revenue. And while that's the sort of thing that's hard to replicate, Robinson said there was hope that the edition marking Obama's inauguration would provide a similar windfall. "We do think these sales speak to the enduring value of newspapers in all of their facets," she said.

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