Found via Bizzy Blog, Thomas Lifson and Jack Risko of The American Thinker go deep inside the New York Times' financial numbers. This factoid is particularly intriguing:

The Times has seen its comparable core metropolitan circulation decline by 27% since 1993 (the first year that such figures were available online), when it had a circulation of 758,000. Its current 556,000 circulation places it a dismal number three in its home market behind the New York Daily News (689,000) and the New York Post (663,000).

The New York Times Company’s common shares are divided into separate classes, with the holdings of the founding Sulzberger clan able to elect a majority of directors, despite accounting for a single digit share of total equity. The family gets to call the shots, and so far they are sticking with Pinch Sulzberger, who dreamed up the national circulation strategy, along with some other growth and diversification moves (buying the Boston Globe and investing in the widely unwatched Discovery Times cable channel) which have not exactly set the world on fire.

The way that the Times reports its numbers – so obliquely as to draw attention away from its decline – shows that it does not run itself for shareholders as a normal public corporation should.

But the way the Times reports its business risk does bear a certain uncanny resemblance to the way the Times reports many political issues on which it has a party line. Facts are presented, but in ways intended to persuade the reader to swallow a partial or even misleading truth, because management wants them to believe something dubious.

One man, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, chooses those who write the editorial content and 10-K reports. Consistency in approach between the news and business sides of the enterprise is not really surprising, and likely reflects his personal leadership.