More Bad News For Times Employees
By Don | July 1, 2009
Employees of the New York Times Co. received more bad news with the announcement of their retirement fund investment losses.
From the Boston Business Journal
The 401(k) retirement plan for New York Times Co. employees, including workers at The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram and Gazette, suffered $154 million in investment losses in 2008, according to a regulatory filing.
Net assets of the plan for the Times, which owns the Globe and T&G, fell to $417.7 million.
The plan was particularly hard hit by some $171.5 million in losses within several mutual funds. For example, the plan’s largest holding, the Vanguard 500 Index Investment fund, suffered a nearly 40 percent loss in value. Another fund in the Times’ portfolio, the Vanguard Asset Allocation Investment fund, dropped nearly 32 percent year-over-year.
Only one of its major fund holdings, the Dodge & Cox Income Fund, posted a positive return in 2008.
Investments in fixed income and insurance assets generated $5.3 million in income. Dividend income of $11.6 million also helped offset losses.
Interest income from the company’s borrowing from its retirement fund totaled $594,000.
The Times has traditionally matched a fraction of Globe employees’ contributions to their 401(k) accounts, however a proposal in front of Boston Newspaper Guild leadership would eliminate the program.
The Times wasn't the only company that suffered investment losses last year, but for employees of the paper it only adds insult to injury.
Post #2152
5 Comments | Post a Comment
Almost as pointless as your comment Mr.Krugman. At least it did not put our service people in danger.
No doubt that newspapers are sinking everyday. And I beleieve that this tendency will continue. Major newspapers around the world understand, that the Internet news is the future. Most of them already joined this trend and nowadays they have very popular news websites on the web.
Post 4,
Problem is, while most newspaper sites are now free, they will begin charging to see the entire paper, or per certain articles. Even just keeping the papers on the web, they still have to pay costs to writers, publishers, all site costs, servers, IT Personnel…ect. The same will happen again, a lack of advertisers. Especially when we boycott all of them (advertisers), and we will.
Until they begin printing both sides of an article, and conform to journalism ethics (which would have kept the papers alive in the first place) people will rail against a fascist point of view.
July 1 at 4:58 pm | #1 | Link
This has happened in thousands of companies: consequently, there is no point to this article except as another lame excuse to put something more in print simply preachifying AIM’s bias and/or prejudice against The New York Times.
Tit for tat, tat for tit, on-and-on-and-on-and-on.
Propaganda?
Brainwashing?
We got it, already!
Give it up!