NEW York Times Co, facing a US$400-million debt repayment and a 60-percent drop in stock price this year, is pursuing asset sales almost a year after its biggest investor demanded changes to the business, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.

New York Times is seeking a buyer for its 17.5 percent of the holding company for the Boston Red Sox baseball team, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing two unidentified people familiar with the discussions. That sale could include the Boston Globe newspaper, the Journal said.

A sale may appeal to shareholder Harbinger Capital Partners, which earlier this year challenged New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for board seats and told him to invest in the company's main business and Internet assets. The Red Sox stake is worth as much as US$166.3 million, according to Barclays Capital, and New York Times says a sale-leaseback of its headquarters building would raise US$225 million.

"Basically everything's on the table except the New York Times itself," said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at consulting firm Outsell Inc in California.

"The reason that we're seeing the information come out now about these asset sales is simply they don't know how long the depth of this downturn will last."

New York Times sold its broadcast television stations and radio station in 2007, before Harbinger acquired its stake, company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said on Sunday.

"We've been very clear that we were going to rebalance our portfolio and by rebalancing our portfolio that meant both acquisitions and divestitures," Mathis said.

New York Times already slashed its dividend by almost three-quarters last month as it confronts declining revenue and repayment on its US$400-million credit line in May. November advertising sales tumbled 21 percent to US$149.9 million, the company said last week.

"NYT does not have the ability to manage its capital structure organically," Barclays Capital analyst Hale Holden said in a research note last Tuesday.

He predicted the company would negotiate a new credit facility, dispose of a small asset, and sell and lease back its headquarters building near Times Square, New York.