Morgan Stanley's Hassan Elmasry continues (Forbes) to lead a campaign against the dual-class share structure that gives the Sulzberger family control of the paper, with 42% of shareholders now withholding support from directors (FT), up from 30% last year.
The shareholder dissatisfaction somewhat echoes Juan Antonio Giner's question last week - that since the New York Times has the best editors, designers, photographers, columnists etc in the industry, the management team must be responsible for the travails of the paper. (Though Giner stops short of blaming the Sulzbergers for anything more than failing to fire the NYT management.)
And yet it remains...when Elmasry and his colleagues were buying the class A shares that bring with them little or no control over the paper's destiny, they knew perfectly well what they were buying. As I said last year when they first trotted out their complaints, it's too late now to claim they want more control of the business as a benefit of having knowingly bought an asset that quite explicitly carried with it no such privilege.
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