Newsonomics: Poison Pill Swallowed, What’s Next For Reeling Gannett?

Sixty-three cents. That’s all it took to buy a share of Gannett at market close yesterday. The entire company — valued at $18.5 billion-with-a-“b” 15 years ago when it owned TV stations but many fewer newspapers, not to mention $823 million-with-an-“m” as recently as January — is today worth ...

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Turns Out Warren Buffett Won’t Be The Billionaire Who Saves Newspapers Either

By JOSHUA BENTON AND KEN DOCTOR  Circa 2012, one of the most popular lines among American newspaper journalists went something like this: “Newspapers can’t be that terrible of a business if Warren Buffett, the smartest investor in the world, wants in.” That was the year that Buffett’s Berkshire ...

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Newsonomics: With Its Merger Approved, The New Gannett Readies The Cost-Cutting Knife

You think $300 million in costs cut is a big number? Try $400 million. Or more than $400 million. Those are the internal numbers in the air as America’s two largest newspaper chains, Gannett and GateHouse, try to land their megamerger, first announced in August. Follow the money: When I ...

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Newsonomics: It’s Looking Like Gannett Will Be Acquired By GateHouse — Creating A Newspaper Megachain Like The U.S. Has Never Seen

The deal isn’t yet finished. But I’m told by multiple sources that there are no major stumbling blocks left to negotiate in a megamerger between the United States’ two largest daily newspaper chains — Gannett and GateHouse. It’s increasingly likely to happen, with an announcement by summer’s ...

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Newsonomics: GateHouse Makes Lemonade Out of Big Layoffs and New Investigative Teams

Today’s editorial managers find themselves in the lemonade business. Their assembly line of lemons keeps gaining speed, and they have to constantly find new recipes to make lemonade out of thinner and thinner ingredients. On Thursday, GateHouse — a.k.a. New Media Investments, or NEWM — ...

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Newsonomics: Gannett Turns Back Alden, But It’s Just A Hiccup Before The Big Rollup In The Sky

It seems like a return to status quo ante. But the ante may have changed. No surprises: Today, Gannett shareholders officially rejected Alden Global Capital’s amateurish efforts to win board seats and push the country’s biggest newspaper chain by revenue to sell itself. RELATED ARTICLE ...

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Newsonomics: Thirst For Liquidity Drives The News Chain Consolidation Games

“People think nothing is happening, but that’s the farthest thing from the truth. Everybody is talking to everybody.” That’s the best quick summation I can offer of the first few months of what I called 2019 Consolidation Games back in January. That line, offered last week by one newspaper ...

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Newsonomics: Newspapers In Name Only & Who’s Going To Build What Comes Next In Local?

Neil Chase knows the painful realities of managing and motivating a daily newsroom in 2018. “You can’t ask dedicated, veteran career journalists to completely change the way they work without explaining why,” the Mercury News executive editor said at a panel discussion I moderated at Stanford ...

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Newsonomics: The Ins And Outs Of A Potential McClatchy-Tronc Merger

Could McClatchy unexpectedly join Gannett and GateHouse as survivors in the game of the American daily newspaper consolidation? Could California become a new epicenter of the American local newspaper business? Could Patrick Soon-Shiong have found a bigger lab to test his theories of AI-enhanced ...

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Newsonomics: Newsprint Tariffs Gone, Print’s Heavy Boot Remains

The newspaper tariffs are dead. How big a difference will that make to those whose businesses still depends on dead trees?   RELATED ARTICLE Newsonomics: Newsprint tariffs are a Black Swan event that could speed up the death of U.S. newspapers July 20, 2018     On Wednesday, the ...

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