Sellinger put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me in confidence, as if taking me into the club. “Listen, Eric, I don’t want to run this as an ordinary business. It isn’t an ordinary business, for God’s sake. We’re trying to publish the best newspaper in America, and I think we often succeed. In the old days that was enough. If the analysts didn’t like our earnings in a particular quarter, it was easy to tell them to buzz off. But now it’s not so easy. The people who control big blocks of stock want results, and in the marketplace, they have the votes. I used to promise we’d never have layoffs in the newsroom, but I can’t anymore. We have problems you don’t want to hear about.”

“Sure, I do. I’ve been spending your money all these years as a foreign correspondent. I owe you.”

“No, you don’t. You’re money in the bank, as far as I’m concerned. But we do have financial problems, that’s a fact. We’ve been looking for ways to diversify, broaden the base of our revenues so we won’t have to squeeze the paper. We’ve started up some things, and bought some things, and it’s been expensive.”

“That computer graphics company,” I said. Everybody knew about that one. We had spent over $50 million to buy a fancy company that supposedly had a brilliant new way to produce computer graphics for the movies. But it turned out to be the second-best technology in the industry, which meant that it was worthless, and we had been forced to write off nearly all our investment.

“Yes, that. And our Internet project is costing us a bundle, with absolutely zero prospect of making any money. And there are other things I won’t bore you with on this nice occasion. But the bottom line—as those idiots like to say—is that we need to raise some new capital. And that isn’t going to be easy. It’s a bad time for us to make a stock offering because the stock price is so low, and it’s a bad time for a bond issue because the rating services think we already have too much debt.”

“So what are you going to do, if you can’t sell stock or bonds?”

“Maybe some joint ventures. Maybe a new equity investor from outside. We’re looking at a lot of things I thought we’d never consider.”

He shook his head and smiled at me. “I can’t believe I’ve told you all this. Forget it, instantly. Now I see why Weiss thinks you’re such a good reporter.” He squeezed my arm and went off to talk with one of the other guests who had just entered the drawing room.