A visit to the Vanderbilt TV News archives (no link; registration is required) reveals that on September 20, 1996:

• GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole was trying to make up lost ground against incumbent President Bill Clinton, while Ross Perot was filing a Federal Elections Commission complaint over being excluded from televised presidential debates.
• It was disclosed that Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski had kept a journal in which he admitted to all 16 bombings he was accused of.
• There was a "change in the FBI's working theory that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb," based on a "revelation that plastic explosives were placed on the plane a month before as part of a training exercise for bomb-sniffing dogs." The plane had crashed shortly after takeoff from New York's Kennedy Airport in July, killing all 230 aboard.

Separately, the New York Yankees were on their way to the playoffs, and their first World Series Championship in 18 years, beginning a run of four titles in five years.

Friday, September 20, 1996 is also the last time New York Times Company stock closed lower than its July 16, 2008 close of $12.59:

Yesterday's 2% plunge occurred while the Dow and the S&P 500 indices each went up by 2.5%.

Recent months have been especially frightening for NYT shareholders, as the stock has plunged about 40% since April 25.

Industry veteran Alan D. Mutter at Newsosaur believes that NYT is one of many media companies whose share prices have dropped so low that they have "become candidates for transactions that could convert them to private ownership."

Perhaps that's what the Sulzberger family, which controls the company, wants. But the family may not get to go private, even with its dual stock structure, which gives it voting control of the company even though it owns only a minority of its common shares. Newsosaur notes that in the past year, "Rupert Murdoch demonstrated in his successful acquisition of Dow Jones that a clan’s resolve can be worn down with a sufficient amount of cash."

It almost seems that the Times is deliberately working to hurt the value of its brand, and not just in the way it routinely distorts the news.

Have you tried the nytimes.com search engine lately? It's a horrid, hollow shell of what it used to be:

Note how the Advanced Search feature common to so many search engines these days has completely disappeared. The ability to search on a date range, or to find results before a certain date, is gone.

Users filling out its reader survey on the new search engine are not pleased (red box is mine; I added my own comments later, which are not in the list below):

Unless I'm missing something, the Times's new search engine makes it painstakingly difficult for readers to compare what it has reported or editorialized about more recently to its past renderings on the same topics, like the TWA 800 crash and Ted Kaczynski's rants. Maybe that's the point.

But I expect that the Times will pay a price in lost traffic, and ultimately reader and user interest, making its brand even less valuable than it is now.

As noted previously, maybe that's also the point.

Cross-posted in slightly extended form at BizzyBlog.com.

—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters