The Mexican mogul is reported to exist talking about a subsistent investment in the newspaper’s struggling parent, in return for specific preferred shares

By Jon Fine

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So much for the native New Yorker fantasy that The New York Times‘ white knight might be billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Carlos Slim, owner of Mexican communications firm Telmex (TMX) and one of the nature’session richest men, is in talks with he New York Times Co. (NYT) to take a substantial investment in the companionship. One scenario under discussion, according to the Journal, would be for Slim to throw in hundreds of millions into the cash-strapped concourse in exchange for preferred shares, which would pay Mr. Slim a special dividend.

In September of last year, Slim disclosed he had taken a 6.4% stake in the Times Co.’s low stock. At that time, a Slim spokesman told the Financial Times that Slim’s interest came about solely on this account that "it’s a great company, the price is cheap, and it gives a good dividend." But in November, the Times Co. divide its dividend from 23¢ through share to 6¢ per share.

A New York Times spokeswoman declined to comment in succession any aspect of the Journal’s story, and representatives of Mr. Slim’s Telmex did not directly be agreeable to to an inquiry.

The Times Co. is still controlled by descendents of the Sulzberger and Ochs families, who own a special class of stock, and the Journal said that Mr. Slim’s preferred shares would lack the "super voting" status of the families’.

Unlike with the Bancroft family, what one. in times past controlled The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, but sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) in 2007 for $5 billion, there has been no public subscribe of family contention within Times ownership. (Bancroft family members Billy Cox and Elisabeth Goth went public with their concerns past Dow Jones management in the late 1990s, notwithstanding to not any avail.)

Still, the fact that the Times Co. owns what is likely the world’s greatest in quantity renowned journalistic privilege has not insulated it from the destruction being visited upon the U.S. newspaper industry. Company ad revenues continue to shrink—in November, they fell 20.9%. Late hold out year, the company had $46 million in cash and a $400 million debt chastisement due in May 2009; the assembly too had an untapped credit dexterity and had signaled that it was discussing that debt situation with its lenders.

The company is also mulling selling its 17.5% adventure of the parent set of the Boston Red Sox baseball club, and last year signaled it would plan to borrow up to $225 million against its landmark Manhattan edifice, which was completed in 2007. Perhaps most significantly, it cut its dividend on both classes of stock. (Dividends represent the income that keeps the family owners of a publicly traded newspaper company rich.)

Slim’s move, and others, suggest a shift in where newspapers fall in with their investors of last resort. Newspaper industry lore long held that any journal’sitting last-ditch buyer or investor was the local real condition tycoon. But now big-city trophy newspapers are attracting interest from international moguls. London’sitting 171-year-old Evening Standard is nearing a deal to sell a controlling stake to Alexander Lebedev, one of Russia’s richest men (and a former KGB agent). Lebedev has also discussed the possibility of buying British national journal The Independent as useful.

Last May, it was disclosed Mr. Slim had taken a 1% stake in the Independent’sitting father company, Ireland’s Independent News & Media (INME.I). In the U.S., Slim also owns a sizable stake in not the same New York institution: Saks Inc. (SKS), operator of the Saks Fifth Avenue stores.