New York Times Co Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. managed to deflect major shareholder insurrection this year by agreeing to offer two board seats to a dissident investor’s rival slate, where one presumes they might be somewhat more placid than when they were banging on the walls of the Gray Lady. Now it looks like he might be working the same charm on disaffected puzzlers.

At Tuesday’s annual shareholder meeting, one woman who said she was an investor in the company asked why the Times didn’t run a Sudoku puzzle. Such a move, she explained to Sulzberger as he stood before his audience at the lectern, would no doubt be a big boon for circulation.

Here’s Sulzberger’s response:

I know it’s something we’ve looked at but I cannot answer the question as to why we haven’t done it yet. Our puzzle is one of the great puzzles of the world and it continues to be a huge draw for us. But I will certainly make your thoughts known to the puzzle people.

If nothing else, he’s more than assured us that his puzzle people will never be considered “synergies,” and if they were, they could probably hide out in the Sunday acrostic all day long.

And on an endnote, perhaps if the shareholder checked nytimes.com, she might find all manner of Sudoku.

(Photo: Reuters, ‘Father of Sudoku’ Maki Kaji)

Most everybody in the U.S. newspaper publishing world knows Philip Falcone’s name nowadays, but it’s not entirely clear that he knows theirs. The Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund manager’s notoriety comes from bankrolling efforts to secure large positions in the New York Times Co and Media General Inc, and then shake up the publishers by trying to get his own nominees elected to their boards.

At Media General, this has generated rancor not just for what the Richmond Times-Dispatch publisher sees as an unwanted assault, but for Falcone’s full schedule making him too busy to even meet the top executives whose strategy he’s trashing. Instead of responding to their overtures, he sent his colleague Joseph Cleverdon as his proxy.

We were unsuccessful in reaching Falcone as well, and Harbinger was too busy working on other projects to respond to Media General Chief Executive Marshall Morton’s letter to shareholders explaining why Harbinger’s bid to elect rival directors to the board was something only slightly better thought out than the Bay of Pigs operation.

The Wall Street Journal reported on what Falcone might have been doing that took up so much time while Harbinger was busy buying up Times and Media General shares. In two words: Bear Stearns .

Large hedge funds — including Harbinger Capital Partners, Greenlight Capital, Tremblant Capital Group and Paulson & Co. — made millions of dollars as Bear Stearns’s shares tumbled and various bearish positions rose in value, according to securities filings and people close to the firms.

Harbinger Capital, the $19 billion hedge-fund firm run by Philip Falcone, a former head of high-yield trading at Barclays Capital*, had a short position on Bear from the summer of 2007 until Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter. The stock fell to $5 from $150 in that time period. In a short position, an investor borrows shares and sells them, hoping to replace them at a later date at a lower price, pocketing the difference in the shares as profit.

To be fair, CEO Morton and Falcone are supposed to address institutional investors on Media General at a forum hosted by investor Mario Gabelli early next month — assuming Falcone’s dance card is still free by then.

* Random conspiracy theory: While we don’t know if large Times shareholders were lining up for or against the company before its annual meeting, it’s worth noting that Falcone’s former employer is part of the Barclays empire, which also has a substantial stake in the New York Times. With friends like these…

Keep an eye on:

- Companies already committed to spending millions to advertise at the Beijing Olympics would find it hard to pull their ads if they felt the situation in Tibet was hurting their images. (Reuters)

- There is confusion over whether Clear Channel Communications Inc’s buyout will close, 16 months after the deal was announced, prompting a nearly 9 percent drop in the company’s shares to $32.60. If the deal doesn’t close by a marketing period that ends next week, Clear Channel could go to court to force the banks and private equity firms to try harder. (Wall Street Journal )

-Investment bank UBS is shopping around the Sundance Channel, has a few potential buyers lined up and could wrap things up in a few weeks. (New York Post)

- Tribune Co’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper and Miami-based WSFL-TV are merging their operations, giving advertisers “a single point of contact” for reaching the South Florida market via print, broadcast and the Internet. It’s the kind of “synergy” that Tribune has been pushing for years, and has the added benefit of saving a whole lot of money as everyone watches to see if new owner Sam Zell can keep the company solvent. (Los Angeles Times)

(Photo: Reuters)

The New York Times made its peace with hostile hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners by nominating two members of its rival slate to its board, but a few hundred miles south in Richmond, Virginia, Media General declared war instead.

Media General Chief Executive Marshall Morton stopped just short of challenging Harbinger executive Philip Falcone to a duel, and instead derided the lack of experience of three board members that Harbinger is trying to elect to the company after building up an 18.2 percent stake.

Morton elucidated in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday:

- On why the newspaper publisher and broadcaster has suffered a 61 percent stock drop in the past year: Today’s world is a world where the customer is in charge, not us anymore. Media General was pretty early in figuring out that the customer was platform-independent.

- On what Harbinger might do to help Media General negotiate the tricky newspaper landscape: We have yet to hear any concrete plans as to what they would have us do differently. … I don’t want anyone to think we don’t listen to new ideas. We’re in search of them. (Media General publishes the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as well as the Tampa Tribune, among other papers)

- On why a buyback or special dividend to jumpstart the share price isn’t a hot idea: We’d rather invest that kind of money in new businesses or in revisions to our existing business. … Those are short-term impact kinds of actions that don’t add value to the cashflow stream.

- On Media General’s family control through two classes of stock. What does the family, including Chairman J. Stewart Bryan III (who holds some 80 percent of the B shares) think about the stock price and your strategy? They’re completely on board with us.

- On the bullet-point reasons in his letter about why Harbinger’s board nominees aren’t even fit for digging ditches, let alone directing a company: I have refrained from being combative and negative, but, I mean, at some point we have to respond to what they say about us.

Shall we say “Pistols at dawn?”