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Short interest in NYT has jumped 42% in a single week, reaching nearly 11% of free float, a level that marks a sharp break from where the stock has traded for months.
The shift in short positioning is the story of the week. Short interest climbed from around 12.4 million shares at the start of October to 17.7 million by October 7, a 42% increase in five trading days and 64% above where it stood a month ago. The ORTEX short score has tracked that move in real time, rising from 52.7 on September 29 to 67.4 by October 7, its highest reading in the available history. That acceleration is unusually concentrated: most of the week's buying in the borrow market appears to have come in two sessions, October 6 and 7, when estimated short interest jumped by more than 3.4 million shares combined. What makes this less alarming for existing longs is that the borrow market is nowhere near stressed. Availability has tightened sharply, falling from around 800% two weeks ago to 250% now, but 250% still means roughly 93 million shares are available to borrow against an estimated short position of 17.7 million. Cost to borrow remains low at 0.55%, up 12% on the week but still well within normal ranges. There is no squeeze pressure here. Shorts are adding with plenty of capacity to do so.
The Street is more cautious than bullish, and the recent Guggenheim upgrade is the clearest break in an otherwise downward trend of analyst sentiment. Guggenheim lifted its rating to Buy from Neutral on September 15, raising its target to $82 from $70, a meaningful move given the stock now trades at $64.90. The mean analyst target is $78.56, implying about 21% upside from current levels, but the direction of travel since Q2 results in August has been negative: Evercore trimmed its target to $85 from $92, Barclays cut to $63 from $66, and BofA lowered to $80 from $87. The common thread is that the August earnings print disappointed, and targets fell in response. JP Morgan remains positive at Overweight with an $82 target. The valuation picture reflects a re-rating over the past month: the P/E has contracted by about 1.2 points over 30 days to 21.1x, while EV/EBITDA has stayed broadly flat. The analyst recommendation divergence factor scores in the 95th percentile, meaning the spread between bulls and bears on this name is wider than almost all peers in the universe.
The bull and bear cases are genuinely distinct. Bulls point to digital subscription growth running at 15% annually, first-quarter revenue of $712 million with adjusted operating profit of $118 million, no debt, $661 million in cash, and management guiding Q3 digital advertising growth in the mid-to-high teens. Bears see a business where subscriber retention remains untested under competitive pressure, advertising remains cyclically exposed, and cost inflation plus pension obligations can erode the margin story faster than the top line grows. The next print lands November 4, exactly 27 days away, which likely explains part of the short rebuild: traders are taking positions ahead of what was, after August, a stock that fell 14% in a single session and another 15% over the following week.
That earnings reaction context matters here. The August Q2 report produced the sharpest recorded one-day move in the available history, a 14% drop, followed by a further deterioration to minus 15% over five days. It is the only earnings event in the dataset, but its severity sets a reference point for how the market has been calibrating downside risk. The fact that shorts have nearly doubled their position from mid-September levels to stand at 11% of the float just four weeks before the next report, while the stock has drifted 3.5% lower on the month, suggests the positioning is more about the fundamental debate than short-term noise. One ownership note worth flagging: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway filed a 13G in May 2026 disclosing a 9.4% stake, making it the joint-largest holder alongside BlackRock. Those are passive filings, and per ORTEX's disclosure, such stakes are as-last-disclosed around the 5% threshold, so the current position could differ. No 13D activist is on the register.
Wikipedia page-view data adds one more data point to the attention picture. The ORTEX alt-data layer flags that retail attention to NYT, measured by English Wikipedia views and ORTEX page traffic, is running at a z-score of 3.1 against its own 90-day history, the highest level captured in the dataset. That reading is dated September 19, so it predates the latest short surge, and it is an attention indicator rather than a revenue signal. The next earnings print on November 4 is the clearest near-term event to watch, and the question of whether the August selloff was a reset or the start of a re-rating is one the positioning now squarely poses.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open NYT on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
