Why Berkshire Hathaway's New York Times bet is a fitting end to the Warren Buffett era

• Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway invested in The New York Times during his final weeks as CEO.
• While one of his deputies likely placed the bet, it's a fitting last purchase for the Buffett era.
• Buffett went from delivering newspapers as a boy to owning dozens of publishers.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought one new stock in his last quarter as CEO: The New York Times Company. It's a fitting final bet for the Buffett era.

The famed investor's conglomerate scooped up around 5.1 million shares of the newspaper publisher, securing a stake worth $352 million at December's close, a Tuesday filing revealed.

The position's small size points to one of Buffett's two investment managers at the time — Ted Weschler and the since-departed Todd Combs — making the purchase.

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Buffett is a lifelong lover of newspapers. He delivered 500,000 papers as a teenager running multiple routes, and for years, he challenged shareholders to best him at newspaper tossing during Berkshire's annual meetings.

He went from throwing newspapers to owning dozens of publishers, including The Buffalo News and The Omaha World-Herald. He was close friends with the late publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham, and one of the paper's biggest financial backers.

By 2010, the billionaire stock picker was openly worried about declining circulation and advertising revenues for newspapers.

During Berkshire's 2010 meeting, he recalled looking at the circulation of major titles such as the San Francisco Chronicle, and said it "blows your mind how fast people are dropping it."

"The world has really changed, in terms of the essential nature of newspapers," he said.

In 1965 or 1970, there was "probably nothing looked more bulletproof than a daily newspaper where the competition had melted away," he continued. "But it's a form of distributing information and entertainment that has lost its immediacy in many cases."

Buffett pointed out that people no longer rely on papers to find out how their stocks were performing, or whether their sports team won. The resulting decline in circulation made newspapers less attractive to advertisers, he noted.

"And so you get this chicken and egg thing that the newspaper becomes less valuable as the advertisers float away, and the advertisers float away as the subscribers diminish," he said.

Despite his concerns, he acquired 28 daily papers in the early 2010s.

"Charlie and I believe that papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly-bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time," Buffett wrote in his 2012 letter to shareholders. "Charlie" referred to his late business partner, Charlie Munger.

"Newspapers continue to reign supreme ... in the delivery of local news," he added.

Buffett struck a far more bearish tone in 2019, telling Yahoo Finance that he expected only a few national titles, such as The New York Times, to survive, while the rest would "disappear." He also bemoaned the demise of the newspaper ad business.

"It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to ... toast," he said.

Berkshire's surprise return

Buffett offloaded Berkshire's newspapers to publisher Lee Enterprises in 2020. Given his long history in the newspaper business and eventual exit from it, it's striking to see Berkshire return with its recent stock purchase.

One reason was undoubtedly The New York Times' recovery in recent years. It grew revenues by 9% to $2.8 billion and its net income by 17% to $344 million last year, as subscription revenues rose 9% and advertising revenues jumped 12%.

A key driver was the paper's addition of 1.4 million digital-only subscribers, which lifted its total subscriber count to 12.78 million as of December 31.

The publisher's stock price has already seen some of the benefits. After collapsing from over $50 in mid-2002 to below $5 in early 2009, it has surged roughly 15-fold — including 50% in the past year — to trade at a record high of $74 at Tuesday's close.

The shares gained another 3% in Wednesday's premarket, perhaps marking one of the final cases of the "Buffett Effect," where other investors mimic his buys and sells, moving markets.

The publisher's comeback might explain why Buffett and his team decided to revisit one of his favorite industries so soon after turning the page.