First off, thanks for the response. I got interested in this, and did some digging around to see what kind of context I could find. To be honest, this 96-percent drop seems like cherry-picking to support a narrative. Granted, I'm probably doing some of the same in the opposite direction, but there seems to be a lot more evidence that the Times is doing OK than that they have literally no money.
For starters, your description of "a 94% loss in profit in the last year" seems to be a pretty clear mischaracterization: That number in the link you provided says the loss is in "net profit attributable to the newspaper publisher" in the third quarter alone.[0] In addition, it seems like most of that is because of increased expenses, not horrifyingly reduced revenue -- the third paragraph points out overall revenue dropped by just over 1 percent. (Incidentally, if you exclude "restructuring-related costs," per-share earnings dropped about 33 percent,[1] NOT 96 percent.)
Now that the Q4 numbers are out, we also have a pretty good picture of what their 2016 actually looked like:[2]
* Total revenue down 2 percent.
* Overall operating profit down 34 percent. This is the one I think you were referencing, and yes, it's lower, but "94 percent" is off by a significant amount.
* Digital ad revenue up 6 percent.
* Digital subscribers up 47 percent, more than half of whom came in the fourth quarter.
* Digital subscription revenue up 17 percent.
So yes, at one point someone did write an article that mentioned a precipitous drop in one specific metric for a particular quarter -- but if you're interested in anything other than scoring cheap political points, the picture is way more complicated than that, and far less bleak.
For what it's worth, after the Times released the numbers you referenced, here's[3] what their stock price has looked like: It was up 10 cents by the end of the week, and has gone up 38 percent since then. If the New York Times is failing, investors haven't noticed. If anything, they're actively disagreeing.
