Free Republic

While overall ad spending enjoyed a modest recovery in 2010, that did not extend to newspaper publishers, which suffered another round of declines (albeit smaller than previous ones) in the fourth quarter of the year. The weak results were rounded out this week by A.H. Belo, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, which announced that total revenues in the fourth quarter came to $130.8 million, down 3.4% from the same period in 2009. The company attributed this to a 6% drop in ad revenue, including a 10.7% drop in display ads and an 8.8% drop in classifieds. Belo's digital ad...

There will be no celebrity-studded gala with fireworks over New York Harbor this time. No brash predictions of upending the magazine business. The debut of Tina Brown’s Newsweek will, in fact, look nothing like the opening of her last magazine, Talk in 1999, an extravagant exercise in self-promotion and impossibly high expectations that came back to haunt her when that magazine closed after barely two years. snip Newsweek has been starved for advertising revenue in the last year as it has languished like a ghost ship — first without a buyer after The Washington Post Company put it up for...

The Bee announced another round of staff cuts Monday, saying it plans to eliminate 32 jobs amid a stubborn slump in advertising. The cutbacks will be the sixth at the newspaper in three years. About 360 positions have been eliminated, including the latest round, reducing the staff by around 30 percent. Although conditions have eased in the past few months, newspapers and other traditional media have continued to struggle with a tough economy and increased competition. "Our revenue performance looks a lot like other area businesses," Bee Publisher and President Cheryl Dell said in an interview. "The recovery hasn't manifested...

The Charlotte Observer will lay off 20 employees, part of an effort to cut costs as the shaky economy continues to plague advertisers and revenues remain short of the company's goals, publisher Ann Caulkins announced today. Company officials were notifying those workers - including five in the newsroom - this morning, they said. The Observer is also implementing weeklong furloughs for salaried employees beginning this quarter. During a meeting with employees this morning, Caulkins said the company was "living quarter by quarter with our budgets." Despite some improvement in ad revenue last year, the economy remains turbulent, and revenues have...

The Seattle Times Co. has sold an eight-story South Lake Union office building to California real-estate investors and will become the building's prime tenant, vacating the nearby building that has been its headquarters for 81 years. The 1000 Denny Building was purchased this week for $36 million by an affiliate of Simms Commercial Development of Beverly Hills, public records indicate. It was one of two properties The Times put up for sale in 2008, saying it needed cash to pay down debt and subsidize its flagship newspaper, which, like most dailies, is struggling financially. The sale "contributes to our financial...

Big city newspapers all across the country have suffered one indignity after another in the last few years. But few of them have been as hard hit — or gotten as much grief for it — as The Los Angeles Times. Here in the city that has always strived to show how a sense of sophistication lies beneath the silicone and the superficial, The Times has joined the city’s impossible freeway traffic as a unifying force of complaint. On a recent weekday evening, Edie Frère, owner of a stationery store in the city’s quaint Larchmont Village section, wistfully recalled reading...

MediaNews Group Inc., publisher of more than 50 daily U.S. newspapers including the Denver Post, is eyeing a merger with Freedom Communications Inc. and possibly several other newspaper companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. Affiliated Media Inc., MediaNews' holding company, filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago and emerged in March under the ownership of dozens of lenders including the investment firm Alden Global Capital. Alden also is part of a group of lenders that now owns Freedom Communications, which publishes the Orange County Register. Freedom emerged from bankruptcy protection last April. The person familiar with the...

Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman is apparently unhappy with advertisers' response to the new four-color paper, and the word inside is that more editorial cutbacks will follow. Decisions about the cuts are expected to be made today. New Editor-In-Chief Kevin Convey is said to be prepping key staff reductions in the paper's Washington, DC, bureau that houses five people, including Bureau Chief Thomas DeFrank. When contacted by Media Ink, DeFrank was noncommital: "I don't talk about internal matters." Sources tell us DeFrank, with more than a decade at the News and an earlier career at Newsweek, is not in danger...

Gannett Co. said all non-union employees in its U.S. community newspaper division will be required to take a one-week furlough during the first quarter due to continuing revenue declines. Gannett executives said the unpaid time off is in response to revenues that remain short of where they were a year ago. "This was, quite frankly, an option I had hoped we could avoid," Bob Dickey, president of Gannett's U.S. Community Publishing division, wrote in a memo. "Furloughs, while difficult, do allow us to protect jobs." A spokeswoman for Gannett confirmed the furloughs. The U.S. Community Publishing division houses more than...

The much-publicized woes of the newspaper industry are due, in large part, to the collapse of classified advertising revenues, and 2010 may well have been the year that buried them for good. Wherever you looked -- real estate, the job market, the auto industry -- the news was bad, not to say disastrous. Combine that with the secular shift to online classifieds, and you have a perfect storm of adverse business conditions. Classifieds used to be a mainstay of the newspaper business, reflecting their once-dominant position in local media markets. In 2000, classifieds contributed $19.6 billion or 40% of total...

The New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News and UnionLeader.com will make a major change in national and regional news, feature and photo providers as of Jan. 1, when they subscribe to both the Reuters America and the McClatchy-Tribune Information Services and end their membership in the Associated Press. New Hampshire's only statewide newspapers and largest newspaper website will also continue to feature content from the Scripps Howard News Service and from the Washington-based Politico group. Union Leader Corp. President and Publisher Joseph McQuaid said the move to Reuters and McClatchy offers editors a wider and deeper choice of content...

This year, for the first time, advertisers will have spent more on Internet ads than on print newspaper ads, according to new estimates from eMarketer. The digital-marketing research firm says U.S. spending on online ads will hit $25.8 billion, surpassing the $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers. The eclipse has been on the horizon for years as consumers have migrated en masse to the Internet, where there are many more options for news, and where newspaper publishers can't charge nearly as much for ads as they can in print. So even while the total audience for many newspapers...

Nonstop handwringing over the supposed demise of old media has missed the real story — the huge amount of value that’s been created in new online content businesses, according to Henry Blodget, CEO and editor of The Business Insider, an online news startup. In fact, new media companies running the gamut from Google to Gawker Media are now collectively worth $289 billion — nearly as much as the total market value, $296 billion, of traditional media companies like Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp. The two groups are “neck and neck,” said Blodget. But the bulk of that new-media value...

Advertising revenue at U.S. newspapers has continued to slip in the third quarter. New figures from the Newspaper Association of America show that in the July-to-September period, the industry's total print and online ad revenue fell 5.4 percent to $6.1 billion from $6.4 billion last year. Publishers across the country have seen ad revenue plunge over the past few years, hurt by the recession and by rising competition on the Web. The latest figures mark 15 consecutive quarters — close to four years — of steady declines. snip

One Sunday in mid-2006, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution arts writer posed a bit of a loaded question in the paper's culture section — one that seemed benign enough at the time, but now serves as a prime example of what a different creature the city's daily newspaper has become: Would the Atlanta Opera enjoy success in its new home, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre? The city's 27-year-old opera company had just announced its move out of downtown Atlanta and into a venue still under construction in, as the story put it, "an area of unincorporated Cobb between Smyrna and Vinings...

Barry Diller, who has spent the better part of a decade amassing a collection of Internet companies — a search engine here, a dating Web site there — has figured out how to help make the Internet work a little better for him. He is going into the magazine business. Mr. Diller, whose IAC/InterActiveCorp owns the news and commentary site The Daily Beast, agreed this week to enter into a 50-50 venture that would pair it with Newsweek. snip Mr. Diller had more than a few good reasons to think twice about not being too territorial when it came to...

Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC is shutting down 11 Sun weekly newspapers to reduce costs, eliminating most of the free publications in its chain, CEO Jeremy Halbreich said. The papers being eliminated are in Geneva, Bolingbrook, Homer Glen, Lisle, Glen Ellyn, Plainfield, Wheaton, Downers Grove, Batavia, Fox Valley and the southwest suburban Lincoln-Way area. They will shut down in late December. Chicago-based Sun-Times Media, which also publishes the Chicago Sun-Times and owns a chain of 39 weekly Pioneer Press suburban papers, may close some offices in connection with the step, but savings will mostly derive from not printing and distributing the...

From: Kelly, Brian To: INSIDE Sent: Fri Nov 05 15:31:30 2010 Subject: Digital Strategy To: U.S. News From: Bill and Brian RE: Completing Our Shift to the Digital World Colleagues, We're finally ready to complete our transition to a predominantly digital publishing model with selected, single-topic print issues. This will allow us to make the most of the proven products, useful journalism, and great audience growth we've been sustaining. Thanks to all your great work, we've been able to maintain our core values of creating high-quality content while establishing a new, healthy business model. This puts us in a strong...

In his wonderful book, The Earl of Louisiana, A. J. Liebling takes many a detour on his way to explaining that state, and in one of them he talks food. Specifically, he asks why food is so great in New Orleans and so bad sixty miles or so to the north. More specifically, he discusses PoBoys. Liebling and a companion stop at a joint north of New Orleans that promises “Shrimp, BarBQue, PoBoy” but delivers heartbreak: “The BarBQue was out, the shrimps stiff with inedible batter, the coffee desperate.” As for the PoBoy, the traditional fried meat or seafood submarine,...

The publisher says it will launch a $200 million debt offering, and will use the money for “general corporate purposes including, among other things, to pay down debt and other financial obligations.” The company had previously announced that it would pay off the $250 million it owes Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim ahead of schedule, but didn’t say where it would get the money. So go ahead and connect a dot or two if you’d like.