Finally! Michael Calderone is reporting that after months of being pressured to do so, the NYT Co. has decided to slash its quarterly dividend from $.23 to $.06 a share. Perhaps all it took was yesterday’s severe tumble in shares (to their lowest point in decades) or maybe it was the junk status they were handed by the S&P last month. Whatever the case, better late than never, one supposes.

As some of you may know, FBNY has an intermittently active twitter feed. And every time some nice soul (usually named “John Smith” or the like) decides to sign up as one of our followers we get an email announcing the new member. Today however, there was a whole new sort of arrival on the scene.

Apparently, the NYT Co. has a twitter and they are following us (which means among other things that they are aware of our random Gossip Girl encounter yesterday — we aim to inform!). But what is the NYT Co. doing with a twitter feed? We took a look and discovered that it appears to be relatively new: thus far they’ve made 13 updates, acquired 31 followers, and are following 71 people (wow, we made the top 100). Thus far it’s mostly news and links.

This actually isn’t the first time we’ve noticed a large company testing the twitter waters (just ours). Apparently the SEC is also in the game, along with CSPAN. Perhaps not surprisingly Barack Obama has one (he has 59,567 followers and is following 62,241). John McCain, however, may want to look into whoever is currently squatting on his space, no pun intended.

The demise of the newspaper industry may be imminent but that isn’t stopping Rupert Murdoch from expecting Wall Street Journal readers to cough up an extra fifty cents for his (newly improved?) paper. Starting July 28 the paper’s price will go from $1.50 to $2.00. Rupe is not shy about raising his prices, this past May he doubled the price of the New York Post from twenty-five cents to fifty.

Meanwhile, farther uptown the NYT Co. saw its stock fall another 2.73 percent, meaning that it has dropped a total of 15 percent in one week. The continued drop is being attributed to last week’s declaration by Lehman Brothers analyst Craig Huber that the NYT Co. “stock was pricey relative to its peers.”