Newsonomics: A (Publishing) Obit For Michael Ferro

On Friday afternoon, Tronc announced that its lead shareholder Merrick Media, led by just-resigned board chairman Michael Ferro, was selling its entire stake in the company. McCormick Media — managed by Sargent McCormick, a distant relative of the McCormick family that controlled the Chicago ...

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Newsonomics: In Southern California’s Newspaper Chaos, Is Anyone Really Speaking For The Readers?

William Baer, assistant attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, had already bluntly told all involved in the Freedom Communications newspaper bankruptcy auction that Tribune Publishing should stay out of the bidding. He sent an email two days before ...

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Tribune, the Register Auction and DOJ’s Scarlet Letter

For 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 ...

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Newsonomics: Setting the News Table for 2016

How can we set the table for 2016? Advertising woes continue — deepen, actually. Whole new forms of storytelling open up and go mainstream more quickly. Virtual reality joins the harsher realities. Hundreds of millions in new investment develops alongside an equally strong belief that legacy ...

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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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New Hollywood Sequel: Aaron Kushner’s L.A. Register

Why, I asked, Aaron Kushner, is he announcing the new L.A. Register as we’re winding down toward the end of the year? Given that the big questions about it — when will it launch, how will it be staffed — are as yet unannounced, why put the news out now? “We were ready to ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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The Newsonomics of the Kochs: Impact on the L.A. News Landscape

Critics can say what they want about the diminishment about the L.A. Times. Its news presence and ability to set agendas, through its reporting and opinion pages, is certainly reduced, but it’s still got the only megaphone of its kind in town. As Gabriel Kahn, a University of Southern ...

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The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising — and Uprising

The new board’s mandate, of course, is to maximize its take on the sale. Tribune newspaper profits run at the roughly $200 million level, maybe a third of which comes out of L.A. So, take the market multiple of 3 or 4 times that number as a price — or $600 million-plus — for the eight papers, ...

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The Newsonomics of the Koch Brothers and the Sales of U.S.’ Top Metros

How did we get here? How did we get to a place where a half dozen of the top newspaper nameplates in America could fall into overtly political hands? What does it tell us about the reshaping of the U.S. daily landscape? How might the Koch brothers’ ownership fare, a lesson applied here that may ...

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