N.Y. Times to Quit Discovery News Channel

The New York Times Co. said yesterday that it plans to sell its stake in Discovery Times Channel, a TV news channel launched four years ago with Discovery Communications Inc., after investing $104 million in the venture.

Discovery Times Channel is available to 39 million premium cable and satellite television subscribers across the country and focuses on long-form current affairs programming that occasionally features the newspaper's reporters. In the original deal arranged in 2002, the Times had the option to sell its stake in the channel back to Discovery after the venture's four-year anniversary.

The Times said yesterday that it was exercising that option, but the final sale price will be determined by an independent appraiser, who has not yet been selected. The company estimates the stake to be valued at $80 million to $135 million, according to a quarterly earnings report released yesterday.

Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said he was "pleased" with the Discovery venture. "But over time our strategy has shifted," he said in a statement. "We believe that shorter form pieces, such as the video we are currently producing on NYTimes.com, serve us well. With broadband penetration increasing, video has proven popular with both users and advertisers. Increasingly, that is where we will focus our efforts."

The future for Discovery Times Channel is unclear. Silver Spring-based Discovery said yesterday that it had no immediate plans to change the name of the channel or the programming. A Times spokeswoman said the two are still discussing options for how to move forward and whether the Times will collaborate on content for the channel. "We hope to work with them in the future," Times spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis said. "At this point, it's hard to give an assessment about the future" relationship, she said.

In a statement yesterday, Discovery noted its recent hiring of TV journalist Ted Koppel and said that it "continues to believe that audiences are eager for deep-diver current affairs programming, and Discovery Times Channel will remain a key component of our ongoing effort to be a leader in producing the highest quality long-form current affairs programming in the world."

Like other traditional media companies, the Times' revenue from newspaper advertising has dropped off, resulting in a declining stock price over the past year. Its Internet offerings, however, have shown a glimmer of hope for a turnaround.

The company yesterday said that profit dropped 69 percent, to $35 million, for the first three months of the year, from $111 million in the comparable quarter a year earlier. Revenue rose 3.3 percent, to $831.8 million. The Times' acquisition last year of About.com appears to have paid off, as it reported a 98 percent increase in revenue for the Web site for the quarter. Total Internet business accounts for 7.5 percent of the company's overall revenue, compared with 4.5 percent in the same period last year, the report said.

"Clearly, the Times sees the future on the Internet and not on broadcast TV," said John Morton, a newspaper analyst. "It's smart. That part of the news business is growing very rapidly and is going to become very profitable."