The gift bags (crates?) also included some comfort for the sole: Havaianas flip-flops.

Oh. This year’s entertainment? The amazing and amusing stylings of Cirque du Soleil. Maybe this year’s theme was Flexibility.

UPDATE: Looks like it’s three months of Dish service, not six.

But it doesn’t matter: Someone, somewhere, is buying up New York Times shares, and someone tells the press that the spike is based on speculation that Slim wants to buy the paper outright.

Happened in March, too, though it may have seemed more convincing then, because the (supposed?) rumor pushed the stock up to $12 a share. Today, the story only goosed NYT to $8.44.

Chart via Yahoo Finance:

Of course, one day, one of these stories could turn out to be true. But that doesn’t make it likely: Slim owns a seven percent stake in the company, and has lent it a big pile of money, at very steep rates. But the Sulzberger family still controls the company via ownership of the B stock, so it will take something extraordinary for that to change.

Earlier this week, Google (GOOG) launched its App store, er, marketplace. Before the announcement, Kara shot a video with Manymoon, a start-up funded my Harrison Metal that is doing work in the social-productivity space. Its online tools are among the more popular on Google’s fledgling app aggregator, but it remains to be seen how the venture will fare. In a case of foreshadowing, or not, Kara covered the bump between Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and Bill Gates this week. Slim, a major creditor of the New York Times (NYT), bumped Bill Gates from the top spot of the Forbes billionaire list by a mere half-billion, or as Weekend Update likes to call it, about 200 times most American’s lifetime earning potential. Kara rounded out the busy week with a post about wireless music player maker Sonos landing $25 million from Index Ventures. Kara even managed to get a lunch date with Mike Volpi of Index, who now also sits on the Sonos board.

John was out this week, but left us all with a provocative entry about the coming siege of HTC by the Apple (AAPL) horde. An analysis by Deutsche Bank says HTC may not have much support for its arguments in the freshly pressed patent suit. John will be back on Monday. We can’t wait to see how this shakes out.

Peter was posting like a madman this week and was on his A game for sure. He caught some news from Twitter that might have easily been swept under the mat. According to the Twitter blog, the company has come up with a plan to battle some of the phishing that’s been plaguing the twitterverse. The compay has decided to reshorten suspected attack links so that it can track them to their origin and decide if they need to be deleted. Creepy? Maybe. Effective? We’ll see. It was a tough week for record company EMI, and MediaMemo was on the case. The giant music label lost viral video mavens OK Go. Peter reminded us that OK Go hasn’t been as viral when it comes to album sales, but the band’s departure is certainly a hit to beleaguered EMI. Peter finished up this week by spending some valuable time on Chatroulette, though not in the way you’re thinking. He covered a conversation that the New York Times had with the Web video chat service creator, Andrey Ternovskiy. Seems that while the 17-year-old isn’t looking to sell Chatroulette right now, he would like Google to pay him the ad money so far denied him on account of his age.

Personal Technology was a little countercyclical this week as Walt reviewed an e-reader device much nearer to the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle than to the iPad. While Walt had some complimentary things to say in regard to the IREX DR800SG e-reader’s design and readability, he’s not a fan overall. The device’s software feels clumsy and it lacks a robust way to download new materials. While the bigger size and sleeker design may be the shape of things to come, Walt put this device squarely behind the Kindle in the purchase line. The Mossblog had a new post for the second week in a row, this time with a video of Walt on WSJ.com’s “Digits” talking about what to consider when purchasing an e-reader. Readability, battery life and ease of purchasing books are what it’s all about, but thanks to the magic of the Mossblog, you can check it out for yourself. Mossberg’s Mailbox featured a few important clarifications this week. Walt fielded queries on AppleTV, securely wiping hard drives and one more magicJack question. Katie got her hot little hands on Motorola’s (MOT) Backflip this week and said the new smartphone, which strangely runs an outdated version of the Android OS, gets high marks for innovative thinking, even if the execution has some bugs. The device offers users a way to use the touchscreen without actually touching it, in this case by placing a touch-sensitive area on the back of the device. The Backflip also features a full keyboard, though all of those features working together in a physical way was cumbersome at times, Katie said. She gave it 6 of 10, but looks forward to more innovation in the space.

That’s all from Weekend Update. We’re staying on the job here in Silicon Valley to keep you up to date with all the tech news, even if you are busy eating ribs, watching bloggers give presentations and listening to indie rock music under the Texas sky. You keep Austin weird. AllThingsD will keep you up to date.

Microsoft bigwig Bill Gates got hip-checked off the top perch as the richest man in the world by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (pictured here), on the annual Forbes list of the world’s Richie Riches.

Slim came to the rescue of the New York Times (NYT) a year ago, forking over $250 million to help the cash-strapped media company.

Often in the No. 1 spot, Gates actually got shoved off in 2008 by megainvestor Warren Buffett (now No. 3), with whom he is good friends.

Gates returned to the top rank in 2009, and now Slim–a telecom-and-more tycoon–has surpassed Gates’s net worth of $53 billion slightly with a $53.5 billion kitty.

Here are some of the other U.S. tech dudes–mostly based in Silicon Valley–on the list, in the Top 100:

No. 6: Oracle (ORCL) CEO and founder Larry Ellison ($28 billion)
No. 24: Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin ($17.5 billion)
No. 24: Google co-founder Larry Page ($17.5 billion)
No. 33: Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer ($14.5 billion)
No. 37: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ($13.5 billion)
No. 37: Dell (DELL) CEO and founder Michael Dell ($13.5 billion)
No. 43: Amazon (AMZN) CEO and founder Jeff Bezos ($12.3 billion)

Both Apple (AAPL) CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs (No. 136 with $5.5 billion) and Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (No. 212 with $4 billion) rank in the longer list.

How else to explain a weird spike in New York Times (NYT) shares?

Sometime after noon today, traders started bidding the stock way up, from $11 to $12, though it’s now dropping back down again. As I write this, shares are moving down to the $11.60 range, which is still a jump of six percent, without any obvious reason.

Unless you count the news today that the paper is printing international editions in Bosnia and El Salvador (really).

Looky here (click chart to enlarge):

Briefing.com (via Barrons) posits that the spike is based a supposed rumor that Carlos Slim, the billionaire who made a high-interest loan to the paper last year, now wants to buy the whole thing.

But if something that nonsensical can move the market, why stop there? Why not suggest, for instance, that investors were tickled pink about the new photo slideshow tool the Times is showing off on its front page? (It really is pretty cool. You should check it out.)

Oh, for the record, the Times has nothing to say about this. Per spokeswoman Diane McNulty: “It’s not our practice to comment on Internet rumors.”

Meanwhile, as Adam Isserlis at Rubenstein Communications notes, the Times isn’t the only newspaper stock popping today: E. W. Scripps (SSP) is up more than 12 percent in a flat market. No discernible reason for that rise, either. Oh, and Gannett (GCI) and Media General (MEG) are up too.

Anyway, now it’s not. The cash-strapped publisher has sold WQXR-FM for $45 million, carving up the asset into two packages for different buyers–local NPR affiliate WNYC and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Radio, a unit of Univision Communications.

The money will be used to chip away at the paper’s $1 billion debt (the terms of the $250 million loan it took out from billionaire Carlos Slim pretty much require that the paper do that whenever it sells off anything significant). It’s not much, but it may end being more than the paper gets for the Boston Globe, which it bought for $1.1 billion in 1993.

The Times has owned the station since 1944; it sold off its AM sibling to Disney (DIS) in 2006.

The deal involves a swap of licenses and equipment between multiple stations, but that won’t be of interest to you unless you listen to classical music or Spanish-language programming on New York City radio stations. If you do, the details are in the release.

The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter, and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead.

So says he New Yorker, which has an extensive profile of Slim in this issue. Writer Lawrence Wright says that when Geffen learned that the Times was working on a deal to borrow $250 million from Slim, he offered to make the loan on the same terms, but was rebuffed by  Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

The Times chairman, Wright says, told Geffen’s people he preferred to work with Slim because the telco billionaire already owned Times shares and because “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.”

Where would Sulzberger have gotten that idea? From Geffen, of course.

Wright also reports that Geffen offered to buy the publisher outright last September; he says Geffen made the offer via Steve Rattner, the media banker turned Obama adviser who is one of Sulzberger’s closest confidants.

The pitch: Sulzberger would oversee the New York Times’s (NYT) editorial operations, Geffen would handle the business side, and eventually the entire business would be handed over to a nonprofit foundation. Obviously, Sulzberger turned that one down.

Wright’s piece–which is behind a pay wall, so it will be interesting to see how much of the story gets circulated via the Web–is first and foremost a profile of Slim, and secondarily about the Times. So it doesn’t spend much more time on Geffen or the notion of other white knights for the paper, a la Google (GOOG).

But in just a few paragraphs, the article does seem to sketch out Geffen’s desire to associate himself with the Times in whatever way he can: Buying it outright, lending it much-needed money or buying some of its stock (via Harbinger Capital).

For now, the Times is controlled by Sulzberger and his extended family, who have repeatedly insisted that they’re not interested in parting with it. Then again, that’s what the Bancroft family always said about Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. And those properties are now a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)–as is this Web site.

If the Times ever does need a deep-pocketed buyer, Geffen has made it very clear he’s available.

BusinessWeek’s Ron Grover says Geffen “doesn’t so much see this as a business venture, but rather as a civic investment.” Newsweek’s Johnnie L. Roberts goes further, suggesting that Geffen would literally turn the Times into a nonprofit if he bought it.

Both Grover and Roberts are longtime media reporting pros, so when they cite sources with knowledge of Geffen’s thinking, I believe them. What I still don’t understand, and what observers and investors I’ve talked to are still puzzled about: How does Geffen plan to do that?

To reiterate: Geffen has reportedly tried to buy the 20 percent stake in the Times now owned by Harbinger Capital, though the two sides couldn’t agree on price. But even if they did, the transaction would only bail out Harbinger, not the Times.

And because the Times has a dual-class stock structure that keeps control of the company in the hands of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, taking on Harbinger’s stake doesn’t give Geffen a foot in the door to the company. It gives him the right to appoint two representatives to the company’s 14-member board of directors, but nothing else. Just ask the Harbinger folks.

Again, there are two plausible ways to acquire the Times:

1. Buy the super-voting shares outright from the Ochs-Sulzbergers, who have said they have no intention of selling. But then again, that’s what the Bancroft family said about Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal and this Web site. And News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch was able to overcome their objections by offering a 60 percent premium to the company’s share price. Maybe Geffen could try that.
2. Establish a large debt position with the company and exercise the power that comes along with that in the event of a restructuring. The problem: Billionaire Carlos Slim has already done that.

So. Anyone close to David Geffen want to explain what he’s really thinking? I’m all ears.

David Geffen, who had previously tried to buy the Los Angeles Times, has been trying to buy a chunk of the New York Times (NYT). So says Fortune magazine, which says that Geffen offered to buy the stake owned by Harbinger Capital, and so says TheWrap.com and Reuters.

None of the stories cite an on-the-record source. But my assumption is that, in all cases, the authors talked to Geffen, who has been known to chat up a reporter or two, and always with a very specific agenda.

In this case, Geffen–or whoever is talking to Fortune, TheWrap.com and Reuters–wants to make it clear that the billionaire media mogul is willing to buy a 19 percent chunk of the paper for a lot less than Harbinger did in 2007. The investment group paid some $500 million for its stake back then, and it is worth less than $200 million now.

Exactly why Geffen is so interested is unclear since it’s not like buying 19 percent of a run-of-the-mill public company where shareholders have real clout. The Times’s dual-class stock structure means it is, for all intents and purposes, a private company owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family. The only real way to exercise influence over the company would be to lend it a good deal of money–which is exactly what billionaire Carlos Slim did earlier this year.

Also unclear: Why Google (GOOG) would have “looked seriously” at the opportunity to buy the Times in the last few weeks, as Fortune’s Richard Siklos reports in the same story.

The part that sounds right to me is that Harbinger approached co-founder Larry Page about a deal. That’s because Page is the Googler most concerned about the declining state of the newspaper business and has pushed the company to think about ways it could assist the industry.

Presumably that could be through commercial innovations like the new search feature the company is reportedly working on or perhaps even via Google.org, the company’s nonprofit foundation.

But I’m told that while Google execs have brought up the notion of snapping up distressed newspapers using its huge cash hoard within the past year, those talks have never gotten serious. It’s hard to see how they could: Google has emphatically stayed out of the content business so far, and it’s unclear why it would change direction now–and invest in a shrinking industry at the same time.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt himself declared that Google wasn’t in the newspaper-buying business a few months ago, in an interview with… Fortune:

“Fortune: How about just buying [newspapers]?

Schmidt: The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question, we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.”

That sounds an awful lot like someone who wants to advertise on newspaper sites, not buy them.

The founder, Christopher Poole, also known as “moot,” received 16.8 million votes. Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim was a distant runner up, with 2.3 million votes, followed by evangelist Rick Warren with 1.9 million. The rest of the top 10 included Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, Google.org (GOOG) head Larry Brilliant, Attorney General Eric Holder, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, basketball star Kobe Bryant and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

While 4chan is one of the most popular sites for kick-starting viral videos and online trends like Rickrolling, with a self-proclaimed 3 million unique visitors a month, it’s unlikely that Mr. Poole tops the list of influential people in the lives of 16 million Time magazine readers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.

In the first three months of this year, the New York Times Company (NYT) lost $74.5 million, or 34 cents a share once you factor out one-time charges, on revenue of $609 million. That’s worse than Wall Street’s low expectations of a five-cent loss on revenue of $630.8 million.

The reason, of course, is that the ad market is miserable in general, and even more so for newspapers. The company’s ad revenue was down 27 percent, notably worse than the awful 17.6 percent decline the Times recorded in the last quarter of 2008.

And as in the last quarter, former bright spots like the Internet business have now gone dark as well: Internet revenue was down 5.6 percent, Internet ad sales declined 6.1 percent, and revenue at the Times’s About.com unit dropped 4.7 percent.

Expect more of the same for the second quarter of this year, warns CEO Janet Robinson: “At this time, and it is early in the quarter, we believe the rate of decline in ad revenues in the second quarter will be similar to that of the first.”

The Times has been trimming costs (via salary cuts and layoffs) and has bought itself a bit of breathing room by getting rid of its dividend, taking on a very expensive loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and selling off assets like its Manhattan headquarters. It still has some moves it can make–it is trying to unload its stake in the Boston Red Sox and to find a buyer for the Boston Globe.

But at some point it’s going to have find a way to start selling more ads again. Because awards alone won’t save the paper–Pulitzers can’t even guarantee their winners’ continued employment.

The Times has stopped providing monthly revenue updates, but it has been pretty good about providing detail via its earnings calls. I’ll be on the road during today’s 11 a.m. call, but will check the transcript and get back to you later with the most interesting nuggets.

“Let’s keep an eye on Señor Slim and get to know him better. A lot better.” That’s Slate columnist Jack Shafer on Friday afternoon, worrying that the New York Times will have a difficult time covering Carlos Slim, its billionaire investor/loan shark:

If Times reporters and editorialist criticize Slim, he can wave the clips to prove to his countrymen that he isn’t a vengeful brute. If the Times doesn’t cover Slim’s every move, it will be charged with cutting its investor slack.”

And here, on cue, is the Times’s first deep dive on Slim, via Mexico City bureau chief Marc Lacey. OK, not so much a deep dive as a series of interviews with other journalists who have covered Slim. But that’s sort of appropriate, since the article is trying to assess whether one of the richest men in the world tries to control what the press says about him.

That depends, the Times seem to say, on where the press is based. No one suggests that Slim plans to affect coverage at Britain’s Independent, where he owns one percent of the newspaper, or at the New York Times, where he may one day own 17 percent of the company.

But media in his own backyard? That’s a different story:

Raymundo Riva Palacio, a veteran journalist in Mexico City, said that after he wrote a column in El Universal newspaper in 2006 condemning Mr. Slim as a monopolist, a Slim adviser threatened to remove newspaper ads from his companies.

That was no small threat. Mr. Slim’s holdings are so vast that he controls a large chunk of all advertising countrywide. Eduardo García, a Mexican journalist who runs a Spanish-language financial news Web site and follows Mr. Slim, estimated his wealth at almost $44 billion as of the end of 2008.

‘I took it as part of the natural dynamic between the media and the powers that be in Mexico,’ Mr. Riva Palacio said, adding that the incident was quietly resolved. ‘That’s how things work here.’”

If you want to learn more about Slim’s business background, let me suggest this excellent (and long) August 2007 profile in the Wall Street Journal.

But here’s a nice summation of his influence in his native land:

Carlos Slim is Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly.

It’s hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in his pocket. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies–he says he’s ‘lost count’–in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing. In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico’s leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country’s annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)…

How did a Mexican son of Lebanese immigrants rise to such heights? By putting together monopolies, much like John D. Rockefeller did when he developed a stranglehold on refining oil in the industrial era….As Mr. Rockefeller did before him, Mr. Slim has accumulated so much power that he is considered untouchable in his native land, a force as great as the state itself.”

To put a fine point on it: Rupert Murdoch is admitting that he spent twice as much as he should have for The Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t a huge shock: When Murdoch made his $60 a share offer for Dow Jones (which also owns this Web site) in the spring of 2007, he was already paying a 65 percent premium over its market value. And, of course, both the economy in general and the newspaper industry in particular have collapsed since then–just ask the New York Times Company (NYT) and Carlos Slim.

So it was only a matter of time before News Corp. (NWS) had to fess up and account for the deal on its books. But that can’t make it any less unpleasant to look at in black and white. The gory details are here if you want to see for yourself.

December was actually less bad than November, which was a complete disaster. The relevant numbers:

• Ad revenue down 15.7 percent, which is less awful than the 20.9 percent decline from the month before.
• Overall revenue down 9.1 percent, another improvement compared to the previous month’s 13.9 percent decline.
• The one real uh-oh stat: Internet ad revenue disappeared. Overall Web revenue dropped 11.4 percent, and ad revenue dropped 12.7 percent. Digital head Martin Nisenholtz had hinted at this in December, but it’s still shocking to see it in print. It’s the second consecutive month that Web ads have declined at the company.
• The Web decline also beat up About.com, which had been the Times’s real bright spot until recently: Revenue was down 13.2 percent there “because of declines in display and cost-per-click advertising.”

Relevant numbers from the fourth quarter: Digital advertising declined 3.5 percent. And the company also disclosed that its pension fund is now $625 million short, a sum it will have to make up over the next seven years.

The New York Times Company (NYT) had already warned that its December numbers would be rough. And it basically pre-announced that 2009 would be lousy, too–“challenging,” in the words of CEO Janet Robinson. Today she offered more guidance in that vein:

As we look ahead, we believe advertisers will continue to be cautious with their budgets, particularly in the early part of this year. To date in January the rate of decline in print advertising revenue has accelerated from what we saw in December, while that of digital is similar to last month.”

So while it’s interesting to peer at past results, the real question for Times investors–including new angel/loanshark Carlos Slim–will be “what are you doing now?” They’ll want to see the paper make steps to fix its near-term debt problems–as it’s trying to do via asset sales–and structure itself for the long haul–which it says it can do without mass layoffs, and which few people believe.

One small step announced this morning: The Times says it has hired Goldman Sachs (G) to formally peddle its interest in the Boston Red Sox and its other Boston-related sports ventures. But given that the paper was reportedly hawking those assets for months, not sure that means that much.

We may get more color about the paper’s plans during its 11 a.m. earnings call; I’ll listen in and report back.

Good to hear: Even after the $250 million deal it struck with Carlos Slim, the Times still needs more cash in the short term. (The long term is a whole other story).

The deal, with W. P. Carey & Company, has yet to close, and the Times isn’t talking about the details, including the most crucial one: What kind of price is the Times getting for its portion of the Renzo Piano-designed building?

At one point, the Times thought the property was worth $850 million to $1 billion. But that was several collapsed banks ago–and bear in mind that it just had to agree to pay Slim 14 percent on his loan. So what kind of deal can it get for its real estate now?

Here’s one way to tell, via a clever MediaMemo reader: Check the stock price of Forest City Enterprises Inc. (FCE-A), the real estate developer that owns the rest of the building the Times is selling. The logic: If the New York Times Company (NYT) is forced to let go of its real estate at fire sale prices, it will devalue Forest City’s property, too.

One thing to look at might be where Forest City trades, since they’re theoretically impacted by the pricing. Granted, they’re a real estate company and so don’t have to mark real estate assets to market unless they’re held for sale (real estate is an operating asset for a real estate company), but the stock market will make some bets on the implications. If FCEA is up in a down market or vice versa, that’ll tell something.”

Interesting. So, for what it’s worth: As I type this, Forest City is up about six percent; the Dow is down 1.5 percent. Maybe the Times got some bang for its buck here after all.

Fear not! We’ll learn more about Slim in the near future–you can count on deep dives from both the Times and The Wall Street Journal into all things Slim.

Though I imagine some of these answers may be less interesting than people imagine. For instance, I’m pretty sure he views his Times investment as a way to earn 14 percent on his money and enjoy a nice equity kicker if the stock ever rebounds.

In any case, it turns out that Slim probably has some questions about the Times himself. Like who runs it and what they do. Financial Times:

Carlos Slim Helu, who has ridden to the rescue of the New York Times with a $250m loan this week, professed to know little about the closest thing America has to a newspaper of record just six months ago.

‘Do you know the New York Times?’ the world’s second-richest man asked one visitor in July. ‘Do you know this guy [Arthur] Sulzberger and some woman called Janet [Robinson, chief executive]? What do you think?’”

It’s too late for any more due diligence at this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to learn about your latest investment. Let me suggest two excellent books about the paper of record:

“The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times,” by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones: a doorstop of a book that’s also pretty readable. It will explain who Pinch Sulzberger is and how his forefathers built the family business.

“Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media,” by Seth Mnookin: a comparatively breezy read that focuses on a couple people who no longer work at the paper–reporter/fabulist Jayson Blair and his former executive editor, Howell Raines. I don’t think the Blair incident “changed the American Media,” but you can allow Mnookin some hyperbole. His book does do a very nice job of explaining the Times’s hidebound–and excellent–news tradition.

What else should Slim be reading as he studies up on his newest acquisition? Let me know in comments below.

It’s a done deal: Billionaire Carlos Slim has given the cash-strapped New York Times (NYT) $250 million worth of breathing room. At a very high price.

Under terms of a deal announced late Monday night, the Mexican telecom magnate has lent the Times $250 million via senior unsecured notes that pay out at 14 percent annual interest. He also gets warrants on 16 million shares of Times “A” stock.

Slim already owns 6.9 percent of the company’s A shares, and the warrants will let him buy another 10 percent. But the Sulzberger family will retain control of the company via its ownership of its “B” class stock.

The Times will use the money to refinance some of its $1.1 billion in debt, including a $400 million revolver that expires in May.

But the cash won’t solve the company’s core problem: Its ads are disappearing, and it has yet to cut cost costs to reflect that reality. And now its costs just increased–it will have to pay Slim $35 million a year in interest.

Brutal. But so are the Times’s prospects.

Here’s the official release:

The New York Times Company Enters into Agreement with Banco Inbursa and Inmobiliaria Carso for $250 Million in Senior Unsecured Notes

The New York Times Company today announced that it had entered into a private financing agreement with Banco Inbursa, S. A., Institucion de Banca Multiple, Grupo Financiero Inbursa (“Banco Inbursa”) and Inmobiliaria Carso for an aggregate amount of $250 million ($125 million each) in senior unsecured notes due 2015 with detachable warrants. The notes will rank equally and ratably on a senior unsecured basis with all senior unsecured obligations of The New York Times Company.

“This agreement provides us with increased financial flexibility to continue to execute on our long-term strategy,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO. “The proceeds from this transaction will be used to refinance existing debt, including amounts currently borrowed under a revolving credit facility that matures in May 2009. We continue to explore other financing initiatives and are focused on reducing our total debt through the cash we generate from our businesses and the decisive steps we have taken to reduce costs, lower capital spending, decrease our dividend and rebalance our portfolio of assets.”

“We are very pleased to expand our strong relationship with The New York Times Company,” said Arturo Elias, director of Inmobiliaria Carso. “We believe that with the strength of The New York Times brand, its national and international reach, its potential for digital expansion and most of all, its world-class news and information, the Company will continue to be a leader in the media industry.”

The notes have a coupon of 14.053 percent, of which the Company may elect to pay 3 percent in kind. The notes are callable beginning three years from the issue date at 105 percent of par, with subsequent call prices declining ratably to par.

Banco Inbursa and Inmobiliaria Carso also received detachable warrants for an aggregate amount of 15.9 million Class A shares (50 percent each), at a strike price of $6.3572. The warrants expire in January 2015.

Mr. Carlos Slim Helu and members of his family are the main shareholders of Grupo Financiero Inbursa, S.A B. de C.V., which is the parent company of Banco Inbursa, and are the owners of Inmobiliaria Carso, which currently holds 6.9 percent of the Times Company’s Class A shares.

[Image Credit: Agencia Brasil, via Wikipedia Commons]

Digital Daily covered the Steve Jobs story this week, starting with the all-hands memo in which the Apple (AAPL) founder announced his medical leave and following through with the reactions of both Wall Street and the company’s investors. Then there’s the general response, which has been variously diagnosing Jobs’s health issues and predicting the demise of Apple without him–not without good reason, but quite a departure from the reaction when Bill Gates left Microsoft (MSFT). Digital Daily also noted that even though Palm’s (PALM) stock price made a jump directly after the introduction of the Pre and its new Web OS, the company will need to sell a lot of phones in order to attract a robust community of developers. And let’s not forget the roll call of fallen companies, including two of the latest to fall victim to the econalypse, Nortel (NT) and Circuit City (CC).

Can Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim save the New York Times? MediaMemo had the story of the gray lady’s possible white knight, plus coverage of some recent ideas about how newspapers in general can be rescued from a grim fate. Hint: not by a Facebook event. There are some bright spots for traditional media, though, made possible by the increasingly social Web. Incredible photos are often made available for free and as news is breaking, saving editors from the limitations and high prices they’re accustomed to from established agencies. A perfect example arose this week when U.S. Airways flight 1549 made a spectacular emergency landing on the Hudson. Twitter, a camera phone and an incredible photo almost singlehandedly changed the way people think about citizen journalism–as an aid to, not a replacement for, professional reporting.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, BoomTown moderated the SuperSession panel titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025.” A lot of the discussion involved pretty much the general consensus of what’s on the horizon, but there were some edgier ideas from the panel, which included an interesting cross section of the digital industry. BoomTown interviewed all of the participants on camera afterward about their visions of 2025, and some of the results were pretty funny. Of course, BoomTown had a say about the various degrees of silence and hysteria surrounding Steve Jobs’s health issues, urging people to put things in perspective, and evoking his 2005 commencement speech, in which he advised graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” BoomTown says: Not this foolish. The passing of the leadership torch at Yahoo (YHOO) took center stage last week, starting with the classy exit of Sue Decker and her memo to the troops. Next up: Yahoo’s official announcement of Carol Bartz as CEO and her first words as its fearless leader: “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’.” Here’s full coverage of the transition.

Walt Mossberg voiced his strong and sensible opinion about the media circus surrounding Steve Jobs’s leave of absence on Fox Business last week, which is, first and foremost, concern for the man and best wishes for his recovery. On the gadget front, he discusses different options for putting e-books on your cellphone and Web OS, the new operating system that debuted with the Palm Pre. Katie Boehret looked at a couple of Web search tools that deliver better results by paying attention to what results you click on.

More next week. Wait–later this week.

So this is kind of like that: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim may invest “hundreds of millions” in the paper via what amounts to a high-interest loan. Slim, a telecom magnate whom Forbes pegged as the second richest man in the world last year, is looking at buying a slug of preferred stock in the New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal reports.

If the deal goes through, it will give the Times some breathing room to deal with its cash crunch–it has $46 million in cash and more than $1 billion in debt, with a $400 million revolver that winds down in May. But it won’t solve its core problem– print ad dollars are disappearing and it hasn’t figured out how to replace them on the Web.

The breathing room will be expensive, too. But the paper doesn’t have many options at this point. WSJ:

For the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times through super-voting shares, the advantage of such a move would be that it would give the company capital without forcing them to relinquish control or dilute other shareholders. The downside is that the cost of such capital is generally very high.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc needed $5 billion in September, for example, it found a willing investor in Warren Buffett but only after agreeing to pay a 10% dividend on perpetual preferred shares. Yet with credit tight, especially for companies like the Times that have poor credit ratings, many lenders have few options but to accept onerous terms.

Mr. Slim, who is said to be worth $60 billion, already had a 6.4% stake as of the end of September. The value of the investment has dropped by more than half…since then and is now worth about $60 million. At the time of the investment, a spokesman for Mr. Slim said the 68-year-old billionaire simply saw an opportunity for a piece of a ‘great’ company at an ‘attractive’ price and had no plans to take a role in its management or board.”

The Times declined to comment on the report to me, but Reuters has followed up with a story of its own confirming the basics of the WSJ account.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates may be wealthier than you or I, but he’s not wealthier than Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway boss has overtaken Gates as the world’s wealthiest man.

According to Forbes, Buffett is worth $62 billion. Gates is worth just $58 billion, which puts him in third place on the publication’s billionaires list behind Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helú (but 782 billionaires ahead of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg–YAY!). Interestingly, Gates might have remained richest man in the world had Microsoft not made its hostile bid for Yahoo. (Damn you, Jerry Yang.)

Anyway … for Gates, who’s never really been comfortable with his ranking in Forbes’s annual encomium to obscene wealth, this is likely a welcome dethronement. Asked once if he would be upset if someday he were no longer the world’s richest man, Gates replied, “I wish I wasn’t. There’s nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.”

Corporate maneuverings are the stuff of our days and nights here at AllThingsD.com. So SAP’s retreat today from its hard line on fighting a copyright infringement suit brought by Oracle caught the eye of Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski (right), who found it curious that Henning Kagermann, SAP’s chief executive, backed down so suddenly after vowing “We have no intention to settle.” You can read about the probable reasons for the reversal in John’s post or by watching his video, which can also be viewed below.

Google’s decision to buy GrandCentral Communications proved interesting to John on a couple of levels, not the least of which might be the search engine leader’s interest in controlling your voice data.

And he was intrigued as well by the Russian government’s gambit of closing down AllofMP3.com, a digital music storefront that sold songs for pennies due to a loophole in Russian law, while opening a similar service.

Finally, John found a certain irony in the news that Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim had overtaken Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as the world’s richest man–a crown that sat uneasily on the head of the software billionaire, by his own admission.

Posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan.