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.
McClatchy’s bankruptcy is barreling to a conclusion. Tribune’s quietly trimming its board to prepare for a merger. Google and Facebook face unprecedented calls to pay up on at least three continents. And all the while — wait for it — Alden Global Capital’s Heath Freeman is joining the fray, ...
Read MoreSixty-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 ...
Read MoreAs local newspapers’ businesses hit the skids, they’re finding themselves careening right now into a future they’d thought was still several years away. “We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week. At ...
Read MoreBy 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 ...
Read MoreIt is the best of times for The New York Times — and likely the worst of times for all the local newspapers with Times (or Gazette or Sun or Telegram or Journal) in their nameplates across the land. When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll... ...
Read MoreIs it the apocalypse, or just an unreasonable facsimile? In a week of newspaper industry drama — GateHouse’s expected takeover of Gannett and McClatchy’s unexpected move in the direction of bankruptcy — who could write a better next act than that old newspaper vaudeville duo of Michael ...
Read MoreYou 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 ...
Read MoreWhat do you call a daily newspaper that’s no longer a daily newspaper? “Sunday + Digital” sounds far less poetic. That’s now more than an academic question. Many publishers — if not most — are now seriously modeling and planning for the transformation of their businesses from seven-day ...
Read MoreThe 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 ...
Read MoreCall it megaclustering. If a GateHouse/Gannett merger — rumored for weeks, today reported as a deal in some stage of progress by The Wall Street Journal — becomes reality, about 1 of every 6 daily newspapers in the United States would be owned by a single company. Totaled up, 267 dailies would ...
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