Here’s another small example of how the Washington Post is demonstrating its leadership among daily newspapers, in this case on the web. The company has been largely immune to the industry-wide meltdown because of its diversification (i.e., Kaplan), its tech-savviness (i.e., video podcasts in HD), its renowned political reporting, and its fundamental understanding of how [...]
It’s stories like this that make you realize what a critical role strong daily newspapers play in the health of a democracy and how sorely they will be missed, locally and nationally, as they wither and start to fold one by one.
Tags: Death Of The Daily Newspaper, Decline of the Dailies, Successful Democracies [...]
Minneapolis Star Tribune Publisher Chris Harte recently concluded 3 days of closed-door meetings (so secret that confidentiality agreements were required for participants) with his senior management team, union leaders, the turn-around firm that has been brought in (Restructuring Associates), and Bain Consulting. The topic of discussion was, of course, the dire predicament facing the daily [...]
As I’ve written about before, the Employment Guide has been running ads for one of the biggest sleazebags in the recruitment advertising industry for as long as I can remember. This guy runs ads charging $24.99 for emplyment applications and test prep materials for postal jobs and other government jobs, all of which are freely [...]
There Is No Positive Alpha In Daily Newspaper Stocks
Shocking that a recent post on seekingalpha.com shows how poorly daily newspapers fared in maintaining, let alone growing, their market share in 2007. Of the 17 media companies examined, the 3 worst performers were New York Times, McClatchy, and Gannett. Also not surprising was the fact that [...]
Yahoo! stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. I never knew that.
Tags: Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, Will Yahoo Sell To Microsoft, Microhoo
As reported by the Silicon Alley Insider, Monster halted trading yesterday because it had to release a note concerning Q1 operating expenses that “appear to exceed the current analysts’ consensus expense levels.” The roughly $330M in operating expenses, purportedly relating to compensation and a big branding campaign, equals the previous 2 quarters combined! That’s [...]
According to ERE, Jobster has burned through most of the $48 million it raised a few years ago and is out trying to raise another round of capital. The Seattle-based company, which garnered tons of attention thanks to dysfunctional, egomaniacal CEO Jason Goldberg (who is now running a new start-up SocialMedian), is under new management.
With [...]
Lee Enterprises is my latest newspaper stock chart that I’d love to snowboard down. This company, which paid about $1.5B for Pulitzer, Inc. just over 3 years ago, is worth just $460M or so today. The acquisition apparently didn’t work out too well.
Tags: Lee Enterprises, Snowboarding Down Stock Charts, Newspaper Stocks, Great [...]
McClatchy reported that revenue in February fell by 11.7% from February of 2007, and that advertising revenue dropped 13.3% from the same month a year ago. Pretty brutal results for the nation’s 3rd largest newspaper company.
Tags: McClatchy, Newspaper Revenue, Newspaper Advertising Revenue, Daily Paper Financials, Declining Businesses, Businesses That Are [...]