Newsonomics: When News Companies Are No Longer Built To Last

I’ve gotten feedback about vulture capitalists, hatchet men, and chop shops, and of close-to-retirement publishers getting that unexpected knock on the door from visiting corporate vice presidents. I’ve heard about 30-year-old journalists turning in their resignations, and other young reporters ...

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Newsonomics: Are Post-Paton DFM Cuts More Than a Milking Strategy?

Two 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, ...

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Newsonomics: Razor-Thin Profits Cut Into Newspapers’ Chances at Innovation

If 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 ...

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Newsonomics: A Coast-to-Coast Newspaper Shuffle Is Taking Shape

From coast to coast, the spring scent of newspaper transactions hangs in the air. The big one — Apollo Global Management’s purchase of Digital First Media — is nearing completion. Meanwhile, sellers from New York City to southern California test the mettle (and wallets) of would-be buyers. ...

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What Are They Thinking? Apollo’s Acquisition of Digital First Media

Apollo Global Management has almost won its two-horse race with Cerberus Capital Management to acquire Digital First Media’s 75 daily newspapers and more than 100 non-dailies, or as DFM likes to put it “800 multi-platform products reach 64 million Americans each month across 14 states.” The two ...

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Newsonomics: The U.S. Newspaper industry’s $1.4 Billion Money Hole

How big a hole is the U.S. daily newspaper industry in? We know the toll in newsroom jobs — about 20,000 lost in a little under a decade — and the fact that the industry as a whole took in about $26 billion less in 2014 than it did a decade earlier. We’re used to,... Read More

Newsonomics: Digital First Media’s Upcoming Sale Produces Some Surprises

Anxious journalists from San Jose to Saint Paul, New Haven to Novato await the final shouts of the Digital First Media auction. Bidding is still in progress, as DFM’s regional business heads coast to coast make presentations to would-be buyers, anonymous to them, by conference call. They share ...

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The Envelopes Open on the Sale of Digital First Media Newspapers

Valentine’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 ...

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Newsonomics: Digital First Media’s Newspapers Half-Billion Dollar Pricetag (and California Schemin’)

Could 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 ...

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Newsonomics: Tribune’s Latest Lease on Life

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor Companion post: Newsonomics: Split ‘Ems — & Then There Was Gannett   First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab “We’re getting toward the end of the finish line,” Jack Griffin tells me as he sits in a car whooshing to an ...

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