The Four

Then, my plan was to stretch this strategy beyond the Times. I
envisioned creating a consortium of newspaper owners—the
Sulzbergers of the Times, the Grahams of the Washington Post, the
Newhouses, the Chandlers, Pearson, and Germany’s Axel Springer,
among others. This group would represent the highest-quality, most
differentiated media content in the Western world.
This was our one and only chance to staunch the decline of print
journalism and capture (back) billions in shareholder value. It
wouldn’t have lasted forever. But for an also-ran search engine like
Microsoft’s Bing, it could have provided a potent weapon against
Google. Bing at that point had about 13 percent share of search.
Exclusive rights to differentiated content via iconic brands, whether
from the Times, the Economist, or Der Spiegel, had to be worth a few
points of market share. This means of differentiation was worth
billions.
Today, the search industry is worth half a trillion dollars. Some
would argue more, as Amazon is technically a search engine with a
warehouse attached. That means each point of market share in this
industry is worth $5 billion plus. My plan was to form the consortium,
lease our content, and start pushing back on tech firms that had built
billions in stakeholder value based on our content.
Even as the housing bubble showed signs of strain, and advertising
continued to drift online, the newspaper business was robust, and
properties were in play. Rupert Murdoch had just bought the Wall
Street Journal for $5 billion, and the Times was trading at a much
lower multiple.
In addition, there were other buyers sniffing around. I had heard
from two different sources that Michael Bloomberg was also
contemplating a bid for the Times. Term limits, it seemed, were about
to force him from office, and the Times was the perfect project for a
New York billionaire who had taken financial information, brought it
into the digital age, and created tens of billions of shareholder value in
the process. (We didn’t know at the time that when you are Michael
Bloomberg, “term limit” is more of a suggestion than a real limit.
Bloomberg went on to strong-arm the city council into a third term.)
Finally, if all else failed, the New York Times Company owned a
bunch of stuff we should, and would, sell, including: