These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Sam Zell’s Memo to Employee ‘Partners’ | E&P — “[H]ow did we get here? It has been, to say the least, the perfect storm. A precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy have coupled with a credit crisis, making it extremely difficult to support our debt. All of our major advertising categories have been dramatically impacted.
By restructuring our debt, we will reduce the pressure on the company’s operating businesses, enabling us to pursue our vision of creating a sustainable, cutting-edge media company that is valued by our readers, viewers, and advertisers, and that plays a vital role in the communities we serve.”
- Hey, conservative billionaires, wanna buy a newspaper?; Update: Cash-strapped NYT borrows against building | Michelle Malkin — An Angry Shouty person writes: “Despite their serious and persistent business problems, however, newspapers still have considerable clout, especially in local and state politics. Imagine replacing liberal editors at your local rag with conservative ones. Wouldn’t it be nice if for once your local paper cast a critical eye on local recycling programs and what your kids are being taught in school?
For wealthy conservative activist/philanthropists, there may be no more cost-effective way to gain political influence than by buying up local newspapers at distressed prices. Think of the opportunity to modernize these dinosaurs and snatch up mainstream media bargains in important swing states like Colorado and Florida.” - Newspapers: The Final Solution | Ron Kaye L.A. — For much of this year, most of the major newspaper corporations have been meeting in secret to figure out how to survive — without really changing. The strategy involves consolidations through partnerships and transfer of ownership and closures that will give total dominance over major metropolitan entities to single newspaper operations.
In recent months, the strategy has been unfolding with more than two dozen major papers being put up for sale only to find out they were worth no more than the value of their assets: Buildings, land, the distribution system, the bottom line value to advertisers of those, mostly older, customers still addicted to holding a newspaper in their hands.
The presses themselves were worth no more than what Third World countries were willing to pay for them.
- Read all about it: newspapers are done for | Andrew Sullivan — Times Online — I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.
Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m.
- Waste, over-spending and poor revenue strategies contribute to CCHQ’s deteriorating financial position | ConservativeHome — “£500,000 was spent on newspaper and internet adverts earlier this year to launch a ‘Friends of the Conservatives’ scheme. Few Friends have been recruited and many believe that that money could have been much better spent. There are many other harder-to-cost examples of controversial, big ticket expenditures.
Almost nothing has been done to raise money via the internet. More than £250,000 spent on the recent revamp of conservatives.com did nothing to change that.”
- Lost Decade? Or Memorable Hangover? | Economic Principals — “The most striking omission in ‘The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008′, however, is any discussion of the Swedish experience when its real estate bubble collapsed in 1992, when swift government action reduced the number of banks to 124 from 525 and rekindled steady growth after just two years. Outlook columnist Brenda Cronin stated the dogma succinctly this way in The Wall Street Journal last week – “The paramount lessons for nations battered by financial crises are: Act quickly, consolidate the financial sector and pursue the right balance of recapitalizing banks and isolating troubled assets. Sweden did all three, and Japan arguably did none, taking timid and unsuccessful measures for years before a new government forced sweeping action in 1998.”
