It’s a bit curious to see the activist investor ValueAct Capital targeting The New York Times Company, after building a sizable 6.7 percent stake in America’s most venerable media company. The goal of any activist, after all, is to amass a meaningful stake in a public company in order to leverage that ownership into getting management and the board of directors to do the things you want them to do. Once caricatured as corporate raiders (and not always inaccurately), these shareholders often provide a necessary cleansing of the toxins that often build up in a corporate ecosystem.
Barbarians at the Times
William D. Cohan
August 14, 2022
