And Now For More Boston Globe Bashing - XXII

The hits just keep on coming:

The New York Times Company [$NYT] reported second quarter 2013 earnings 48% below last year's quarter due to severance and other "special" items but digital paid subscriptions rose 40%.

The full results are here: www.nytco.com/pdf/2Q_2013_Earnings.pdf

Despite rising numbers of readers and paid subscriptions, the company continues to struggle as advertising revenues continued to fall again— 6% in this quarter. This is the eighth sequential quarter of declining print and digital advertising revenues.

"Print and digital advertising revenues decreased…largely due to ongoing secular trends and an increasingly complex and fragmented digital advertising marketplace."

Jeff Bercovici, media reporter at Forbes, noted that the good news on digital was not enough.

Digital subscriptions still represent a smallish part of the company’s overall revenue picture — just 15% of circulation revenue and 7.8% of total revenues, which fell 1% in the quarter, to $485 million.

This is just a further indication that John Henry's recent purchase of the Boston Globe is a simple real estate play.