April 20, 2024
In five languages (English, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian) and two U.S. printing, “Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get” is the first Ken Doctor book. Sign up here for notice of the new Newsonomics Readers.
What started as a marathon has turned into an obstacle course. In today’s wee hours, just before dawn, Tribune Publishing was named as the “winner” in the Orange County Register bankruptcy auction. Tribune’s winning bid of $56 million in cash – topping high-end estimates of the combined value ...
Read MoreFor those who have been following the ongoing tragicomedy of California’s dying newspaper industry, today, March 16, marks a climax. And as with all amazing stories, the moments leading up to that climax have made it a nail-biter. The real action is mundane enough: Today is the day that final ...
Read MoreNothing is easy when it comes to newspapering in southern California. Two bids for the Orange County Register, and associated properties, are now in to a bankruptcy court, and my sources indicate they are on the “puny” side. That may not be surprising, considering the current dismal state of ...
Read MoreChicago entrepreneur Michael Ferro will soon move across town, into the third-floor chairman’s suite in the legendary Tribune Tower. Yes, he’ll be 16 floors below Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin, and the Tower is for sale anyway, but his new presence there will be something to watch. On ...
Read MoreTwo months ago, Digital First Media’s deal to sell itself to Apollo Global Management collapsed (“Apollo withdraws from DFM deal, Paton leaves”), and its founding CEO (and would-be industry leader) John Paton said he would leave the company. Now, as of July 1, he’s gone. New CEO Steve Rossi, ...
Read MoreYelp’s for sale, and the news has generated the usual, now-tiresome lists of potential buyers: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook. It’s like all the money in the business world slid off one end of the table and sluiced down to Silicon Valley. Forget the old spend-a-week-without-the-Internet ...
Read MoreIf you want to talk about profits at the U.S.’s top newspaper companies, you don’t need big numbers any more. Tribune Publishing could count a bare $2.5 million in net income for the first three months of the year. That’s the combined net of eight metro papers, including the ...
Read MoreValentine’s Day may be coming early for Digital First Media this week. DFM’s board and UBS, its broker, open the envelopes, looking for affection. It’s an uneasy love-me/love-me-not time, newspapers’ version of Match.com. Will DFM’s affection for the open market be returned, or will it be left ...
Read MoreCould the sale of the Digital First Media properties lead to the U.S.’s first quasi-national newspaper company? That’s the hope of DFM’s current owners, and the shiniest lure tossed out into the newspaper property marketplace by UBS, the unorthodox pick of DFM to be its banker/broker as its six ...
Read MoreCall it the newspaper network wars. The Washington Post’s Newspaper Partner Program has grown from a March-planted seedling into a full-grown fall oak. The initiative now includes more than 120 daily newspapers in the U.S., and could connect with more than 200,000 digital newspaper subscribers ...
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