The article raises a decent point, but yes the -40 is obviously misleading. Why would anyone sell it for negative instead of just liquidate it? When NYT bough

The article raises a decent point, but yes the -40 is obviously misleading. Why would anyone sell it for negative instead of just liquidate it? When NYT bought the paper it essentially paid 1bil + 100mil-ish assumption of pensions. Now when it sold it, it only got 70 mil. It's better to correctly restate the purchase price, rather than make the selling price negative. But that wouldn't generate click throughs. Edit: This is related to the Enterprise Value concept of a company. You include liabilities in this calculation when calculating a buyout valuation (not sure if that includes pensions or not; I don't do stocks anymore now because it's all just a giant federal reserve hedge fund) Edit 2: wikipedia says EV should include unfunded pensions, which makes rational sense.