David Geffen, the entertainment mogul who signed acts including Bob Dylan, Jackson Brown and the Eagles, has tried to buy into The New York Times, it emerged yesterday.

Mr Geffen tried to acquire a 19 per cent stake in the The New York Times Company held by Harbinger Capital Partners, the activist hedge fund, but was rebuffed. The newspaper has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896, who maintain their grip with a separate class of super-voting shares.

However, the dominance of the family, headed by Arthur Sulzberger, has come under pressure as advertising collapses and losses mount, creating a belief that The New York Times may be sold.

Mr Geffen’s move, two years after he failed to buy the Los Angeles Times, was interpreted as an attempt to position himself favourably if Mr Sulzberger cannot maintain control. Last quarter the company reported a $74 million (£49 million) net loss after a 27 per cent collapse in advertising revenue, which is continuing into the second three months of this year.

However, the man from Hollywood would face competition. In January, the New York Times Company raised $250 million in preferred stock from Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire. Harbinger has also explored alternatives, with Scott Galloway, one of its two board representatives, rumoured to be approaching Google about a possible bid. Google insiders played down the speculation and said that the search engine group had no plans to buy or invest in The New York Times.

Mr Geffen, who came from a working-class family in New York, began his career in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency in Los Angeles. He went on to run Asylum Records – home to the Eagles – in the 1970s and then Geffen Records in the 1980s and 1990s. Geffen was sold to MCA for stock and, subsequently, to Matsushita, of Japan, for cash, and he moved on to found the Dreamworks film studio with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1995, drifting away from the business last year as parts of it were broken up and sold.

With a fortune estimated at $6.5 billion, Mr Geffen co-owns the Rising Sun, a $200 million 138-metre yacht, with Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder, and lives in a 9.4 acre Beverly Hills estate that used to belong to Jack Warner. Before the credit crunch it was valued at $100 million.

A key Democratic Party financier, Mr Geffen was an early backer of President Obama, announcing his support in The New York Times in February 2007, in which he criticised Hillary Clinton as an “incredibly polarising” figure.

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