1) TechCrunch recently wrote about the worsening situation for daily newspapers and the abysmal 2nd quarter they have had.
2) The Economist reports that daily newspapers in emerging economies are thriving. As Thomas Barnett points out, the logic is that:
The demand for news tends to go up as people enter the workforce, earn more money, invest [...]
With the announcement that JobDig is launching its next market in Indianapolis on August 4th, I came across Indianacareerconnect, a job board operated by the state of Indiana. I have been tracking Minnesota’s job board, Minnesotaworks.net, for years and I have been continually baffled as to why states feel the need to offer this service [...]
Surprising no one since all of the other bidders had dropped out, NBC, with support from Blackstone and Bain, purchased the Weather Channel and Weather.com for just under $3.5 billion. Landmark Communications, a private equity group owned by the Batten family and owners of the Weather Channel as well as a number of daily and [...]
Always one step ahead of everyone else, Cheezhead has declared that he has moved beyond ripping Monster, declaring in an early June podcast that he no longer finds it sporting, fun, or even interesting. I still, however, cannot resist. Monster has lost its leadership position in online classifieds to CareerBuilder in large part because the [...]
As I have written about previously, Landmark Communications has put its media assets up for sale. In addition to The Weather Channel, the crown jewel of the group, the private equity firm owns a bunch of small and medium-sized dailies and community newspapers, shoppers and weeklies, and the Employment Guide. Lehman Brothers, who is handling [...]
Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow, a site that publishes information about specific home values, has launched his next site which aims to do the same thing to with salary information. Glassdoor.com, which launches today, publishes salary information on specific positions within specific companies. Much like Jobvent.com or TheFunded.com, which provides user-submitted reviews of venture [...]
Jeff Taylor, not satisfied with having dealt just one body-blow to the daily newspaper industry in the form of Monster.com, wants to land another in the form of Tributes.com. With $4.3M in seed funding from the Wall Street Journal, Tributes.com aims to bring the obituary page and all the revenue it generates to the web [...]
As I have written about (here and here), Landmark Communications (which also owns the Employment Guide) has placed its entire portfolio of companies on the sales block. The crown jewel of the lot is the Weather Channel, one of the last remaining independent cable channels. Not only does the weather channel enjoy impressive viewership numbers, [...]
Silly me for starting to think that things on the venture funding and M&A front were starting to slow down a bit in the online employment classified space. RealMatch announced that they have raised another $3M in funding (albeit a while ago), bringing their total financing to $9.5M in VC funding. More interesting was the [...]
In yesterday’s post, I attempted to estimate the current valuation of the Star Tribune in the context of Blackstone’s negotiations with Avista and Credit Suisse. I surmised that the $100M Avista invested is worth nothing today, and that the remaining $430M in debt was worth no more than $215M, and probably quite a bit less [...]