So how would you turn around a medium-sized media company like this one? Here’s one plan from VCs Harbinger [Big HT: Juan Giner]:

Restart Broadcast Division

• Implement substantial increase in management attention and higher standards given its severe underperformance relative to peers
• Pursue duopolies
• Pursue cable retransmission consent opportunities
• Reduce spending and apply more scrutiny to cost/benefit and payback analysis
• Be opportunistic but disciplined with future acquisitions and divestitures

Improve Publishing Division

• Cut costs more aggressively
• Implement higher standards given its underperformance
• Reduce spending and apply more scrutiny to cost/benefit and payback analysis
• Be opportunistic but disciplined with future acquisitions and divestitures
• Most urgently, consider alternatives for Florida market properties

Refocus the Online/Interactive Strategy

• Exit non-core businesses…
• Avoid further acquisitions of non-core online ventures that require national platform or brand to maximize value or that don’t provide unique strategic synergy
• Focus instead on enhancing the websites of the company’s core television and newspaper properties to directly leverage and magnify their content, reach and value and produce meaningful incremental cash flows

What did the CEO of the company think of the scheme (my italics)?

There isn’t any question that media companies are currently out of favor on The Street. Media General gets painted with the same brush as the rest. People are concerned, more than anything, about the effect of the Internet on advertising budgets and the need for consumers to subscribe to a newspaper, or buy it at a newsstand, in order to have access to local news and information, including advertisers’ messages, and including classified ads.

Well, that model has shifted, and I think we’ve now mostly taken our hits on that. But, importantly, we believe that the “audience aggregation” model remains very solid, and we think we’re gaining additionally on our ability to deliver segments of our local markets to advertisers, precisely because of the new opportunities presented by the Internet and the ease of entry for new products that goes with it.

So cut and burn plays dark whistling desperation. Choices, choices.