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 Demise of Lean Dean Singleton and the Rise of Private Equity

Another way to look at it, at least for a moment, is through the eyes of these new owners. The owners are looking at their properties as the only advertising-oriented media that didn't make a comeback in 2010. With ad revenues down in single digits, the companies continue to shrink in revenue, ...

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Hawaii 5.0?: Pierre Omidyar’s Island of New Journalism

"Our goal is to create the new civic square," he told Pacific Business News. It's a for-profit model, a healthy alternative to the proliferation of non-profits. What should make the initiative watchable (and of course visitable by any number of new journalism watchers!) is that combo of deep ...

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Online-Only PI: 22…..and the Rest, Skidoo

Let's figure there are 44,000 journalists left in US newsrooms, an up-to-date tally hard to keep up with. So, if the industry magically flipped that switch tomorrow, we've got an estimate of how many online-only published could pay: 6600 journalists, and that's at the optimistic 15% number. Of ...

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Rocky Shutdown, by the Numbers

So the Rocky's final daily circ will come in at 210,000, more or less. That would make it the biggest paper shutdown since the columnist-rich Chicago Daily News, which folded in 1978 with a circulation of about 327,000. The last big shutdown metro that came to my mind was the Dallas Times ...

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Sam Zell’s Plan D: It’s All About Buying Time

Buying time, though, is what everyone in the newspaper industry is doing. The New York Times did it today as well, mortgaging its landmark building for $225 million. Scripps is doing it by "selling'' the Rocky Mountain News. All the companies are doing it as they refinance their businesses with ...

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Tribune’s Descent Sends New Shock Waves

* We've learned that Zell isn't too good with math. He told Portfolio's Joanne Lipman just last month that: "When we looked at the historical numbers, we saw an average erosion of about 3 percent. At the time we underwrote the transaction, we used a 6 percent erosion." But look at Tribune's 4Q, ...

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Rocky Mountain News “Sale” Shows Peril of Crossing Profit Line

As daily newspapers become less than daily — witness the East Valley Tribune's move into the world of four-day-a-week dailiness in January — why would we expect a metro area to support two daily newspapers? Against that backdrop, Scripps' announcement that it is ...

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