Newspapers Know No End To Turmoil

"They are taking a major metropolitan newspaper and taking 'major' and 'metropolitan' out of it," said Tom Ferrick Jr., an Inquirer Metro columnist and the newsroom union's chief steward. Ferrick said Marimow, who worked at the Inquirer from 1972 to 1993, was warmly received when presented to the newsroom yesterday.

Nevertheless, Ferrick said, "I don't know why he'd come here to preside over the dissolution of this newsroom."

In Philadelphia, Marimow faces a situation similar to the one that preceded his departure from Baltimore. He took the NPR ombudsman job last month after he was forced out as NPR's vice president for news and information after only eight months on the job, and had time to write two ombudsman columns before exiting for Philadelphia.

Marimow said he took the Philadelphia job because of a fondness for his home town and his hometown paper, because he thinks that owner Brian P. Tierney is a "guy of character" and that the Inquirer can be a great local newspaper, despite the looming cuts.

"There's no doubt there's going to be a period of pain," Marimow said yesterday. "But that does not mean that with the appropriate mission, [the paper] won't be excellent."

Bennett said it was time for a change in newsroom leadership.

"It's been a very rewarding three years but a very tough three years," Bennett said yesterday. "We had to do a lot of hard stuff. There's a very tough road ahead, and both of us agreed that it was better to have someone new to come in and start that."

In New York, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which owns 7.6 percent of New York Times Co. shares, is pressing the company to scrap its century-old ownership structure.

The Times Co.'s market value has fallen more than half in the past four years. Since hitting a high of more than $50 a share in 2002, Times Co. stock has dropped steadily, hitting a low of less of than $22 a share in August of this year. Shares rose 37 cents yesterday to close at $24.53.

The Stanley investors blame the company's ownership structure, which is known as "dual-class."

In their cross hairs is Times Co. Chairman and Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., great-grandson of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought controlling interest of the Times in 1896. Even before the company went public in 1969, it set up two classes of stock -- A and B. Class A is publicly traded, but Class B is not, and it comes with more voting rights. The Ochs-Sulzberger family owns about 90 percent of Class B stock and has the power to elect nine of the company's 13 board members.

"We believe that the [Times Co.'s] current corporate governance practices deviate from what is widely considered to be best practice by corporate governance experts," wrote Hassan Elmasry, a Morgan Stanley managing director.

Morgan Stanley is asking the Times Co. to let investors vote on abolishing the two classes of stock ownership and taking away one of Sulzberger's jobs at the annual shareholders meeting in the spring, which the company is not required to do. The Morgan Stanley pressure is of interest to other media companies with dual-class ownership, such as The Washington Post Co., in which the Graham family holds controlling interest.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.