meek-investor

The sales of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos and the Boston Globe to John Henry raise the question why people would want to own newspapers if they aren’t doing so for obvious financial gain.   There are clearly people who want to own papers for political purposes so they can directly influence debate and policy.   This is certainly the case for the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, who have been trying to buy the Los Angeles Times  this past year. But Bezos and Henry don't seem to fit that mold.   Bezos’ purposes for buying the Post are not the pursuit of profit. He certainly would produce better returns putting more effort into Amazon or another commercial firm. John Henry can expect far more returns from effort in his investment firm or his sports empire than the Globe . So why are they buying legacy media?    The answers lie in human traits.   All of us need diversions. We need toys to play with; things to spark our interest and ...

Ambient news is proving a significant challenge to news organizations trying to serve readers on multiple digital platforms and maintain their print and broadcast news operations. Contemporary technologies all around us are now delivering breaking news, sports scores, and market updates on electronic screens and displays in elevators, taxis and buses, bars and restaurants, on the sides of buildings, through smartphones, and via social media. In years past, we all had to deliberately turn to newspapers or radio and television newscasts, or at least glance at headlines at news stands, to get a quick overview of major events. That era is past. Today news is free and ubiquitous and, unfortunately, provides all the news that most people want. This is bad news for those trying to provide news commercially. In the past, newspapers and newscasts filled their space and time with non-news features and information designed to attract audiences that wanted only a little news. M...

Journalists pretend they spend their time investigating the intricacies of international affairs, covering the inner workings of the economic system, and exposing abuses of political and economic power. Although many aspire to do so (and occasionally do with great effect), the reality is far from the imagined sense of self. Most journalists spend the majority of their time reporting what a mayor said in a prepared statement, writing stories about how parents can save money for university tuition, covering the release of the latest versions of popular electronic devices, or finding out if a sports figure’s injury will affect performance in the next match. Most cover news in a fairly formulaic way, reformatting information released by others: the agenda for the next town council meeting, the half dozen most interesting items from the daily police reports, what performances will take place this weekend, and the quarterly financial results of a local employer. These standard stories are me...

The number of newspapers that have reduced their publication frequency in response to market changes and economic conditions continues to rise. This year the  Times-Herald in Newnan, Georgia shifted from 7 days a week to 5 days per week. The New Orleans Times-Picayune moved to 3-day per week schedule, as has The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., and many papers in the Advance Publications group. In doing so, the papers are bolstering their digital publications and producing in physical form only on days that most interest retail advertisers. From the financial standpoint, these moves make a great deal of sense. Reactions to the changes have ranged from disbelief to resignation in the journalism community. Many have bemoaned the loss of dailies and argued non-dailies cannot possibly serve their communities as well. That argument is problematic, of course, because there have typically been 3-4 times more weeklies than dailies in the U.S. and many have done far better jobs...

The markets of magazine and newspaper printing firms are undergoing significant changes, reflecting on-going transformations in the customers they serve. Some of the changes have been under way for 2 decades with traditional printing companies morphing into printing service companies offering more profitable value-added services and products.   These included high-end specialized printing capabilities and services, database printing, and wide-ranging distribution services. At the same time, the increasing number of magazine titles, accompanied by lower average press runs, pushed the companies toward higher efficiency and acquisition of presses and systems designed for lower press runs. In this environment, many printers could not effectively compete and consolidation began creating large regional players in the industry. Shorter-term trends have also played havoc with the printing industry by killing off some magazine and newspaper titles, lowering the average number of pages ...

Newspapers across the US are shedding large downtown buildings in favor of more modest facilities, often away from the center of cities. The downsizing is the consequence of reduced need for office space following staff cuts, changes in production technologies that reduce space requirements, and the outsourcing many printing and distribution activities. Examples include: The Miami Herald has sold its bayfront building and the 14 acres around it for $236 million and is planning to relocate elsewhere next in 2013. It will use the proceeds to pay down debt and pension liabilities. The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram has sold its home for the past 90 years and will be moving to new offices this spring   The Boulder Daily Camera in Boulder, CO, sold its downtown facilities for $9 million and is moving to facilities outside the center of town. The Tribune & Georgian in St. Mary’s, GA, shed its former building by donating it to United Way of Camden Country in February to be used for work sp...

U.S. newspapers are increasing their use of co-opetition practices, that is, cooperating with competitors to reduce costs, create synergies, or reduce risk in new markets. Such activities are permissible if they are not designed to create cartels or control prices for advertising or circulation. The latest example occurred this week when the Boston Herald announced an agreement with the Boston Globe for its competitor to print and deliver the Herald . The move creates cost savings for the Herald by allow it to cut printing, trucks, and delivery personnel, while simultaneously creating production and distribution economies and an additional revenue stream for the Globe --a win-win for both companies. Such service agreements do not violate antitrust laws because the papers remain independent, set their own prices, and create their own content. If papers were to engage in such actions they would have to apply for an antitrust exemption under the Newspaper Preservation Act (see John C...

Google announced this month that it is ending its ambitious project to digitally archive newspapers. The project to scan the archives of the nation’s newspapers and make them available online as a searchable historical record was announced in 2008 with the level of hubris only found in online enterprises. "Our objective is to bring all the world's historical newspaper information online,” said Adam Smith, director of product management at Google, announcing the project. Those lofty aims were echoed by Punit Soni, manager of the newspaper initiative: “As we work with more and more publishers, we'll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online…."Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we'll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you'll be searching the full text of these newspapers as w...

Newspaper publishers need to explore new methods of pricing content as they expand their digital portfolios because merely transferring the methods used in print can never bring the success publishers desire. Print newspaper publishers have traditionally tended to set prices based on production and distribution costs and not on value created. Unfortunately, this has made it impossible to possible to obtain a price premium for factors such as prestige, service, experience, and convenience. New digital operations, however, provide significant other pricing options because they differ in terms of whether they maintain the existing content bundle, whether non-payers can be excluded from use, the types of experience they deliver and how they are used. Digital media require significant new thinking because they tend to be joint and complementary products with print. These lend themselves to selling strategies of bundling and versioning that permit uses of bundle pricing, option pricing, mult...

The somewhat improving condition of the newspaper industry is permitting companies to move from merely paying operating expenses to finding ways to improve their balance sheets and looking for new opportunities. In recent weeks: The Gannett Co. has placed senior notes totally $500 million that will be due in 2015 and 2018. The notes financed at 6.375% and 7.125% will give the company some financial breathing space by being used to pay a maturing loan and revolving credits. In addition it negotiated an extension on $2.7 billion in revolving credit with Bank of America from 2012 to 2014. The New York Times Co. has cut its debt by 40 percent in past 2 years and is beginning to look at small investments in digital media that may position it for future growth. It recently provided $4 million in financing for Ongo, a start-up news sharing site that will aggregate stories from a number of newspapers. The Washington Post Co. announced it would repurchase 750,000 of its outstanding shares. Such...

It has not been a good month for newspaper unions at bankrupt newspaper companies or the government corporation that insures pension funds. As part of their reorganizations, a number of bankrupt newspaper firms are not paying money owed union pensions or are quietly letting the guaranty pick up the tab for retiree costs. Unions of Philadelphia Newspapers LLC (The Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News) were forced to accept 12 cents on the dollar for the $12 million the bankrupt company owned to employee pension plans as part the reorganization plan. The Chicago Sun-Times off-loaded $49.1 million of its underfunded pension obligations for 2300 retirees and employees to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The paper and it suburban subsidiaries were purchased out of bankruptcy without the new owners assuming the pension obligations. The Dayton News Journal dumped $15.4 million in underfunded pensions payments on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. , which will ensure 1,100 current and fo...

Following hearings on the state of newspapers this past year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission staff has now prepared a discussion paper of potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism. It is a classic example of policy-making folly that starts from the premise that the government can solve any problem—even one created by consumer choices and an inefficient, poorly managed industry. Most of the proposals are based in the idea of using government mechanisms to protect newspapers against competitors and to create markets for newspapers offline and online. The FTC’s staff ignores the fact that most newspapers are profitable (the average operating profit in 2009 was 12%), but that their corporate parents are unprofitable because of high overhead costs and ill-advised debt loads taken on when advertising revenues were peaked at all time highs. It also fails to make adequate distinction between longer term trends affecting newspapers and the effects of the c...

Commercial media have faced product and price challenges in 2-sided markets for more than a century, but are encountering greater difficulties in getting it right as they try to effectively monetize multi-sided markets. 2-sided and multi-sided markets are ones in which more than one set of consumers must be addressed and there is an interaction between strategies and choices for each set of customers. Prices for one group of consumers affects their consumption quantity and this, in turn, affects the prices for and consumption by the other groups. Optimal revenues can only be achieved by dealing with all groups of consumers simultaneously. Newspapers are a classic example of 2-sided platforms. The first product is the content sold to audiences and the second is access to audiences that is sold to advertisers. This has been the basis of the mass media business model since late 19th century and the strategy has been to keep circulation prices low to attract a mass audience and then to mak...

Industry, scholarly and policy discussions about the future of the news industry in North America and Europe continue to focus on how news enterprises can sustain themselves in the 21st century. Publishers keep asserting that things will be fine if they can erect pay walls and charge for news online and they argue that governments should provide legal protections for online news so they can make news a viable digital business product. Their approach is wrong and ignores the fundamental reality that news has never been a commercially viable product because most of the public has been, and remains, unwilling to pay for news. Consequently, news has always been funded with income based on its value for other things. Historically, the first collection and dissemination of news was funded in ancient times by emperors and kings, who used governors and officials throughout their realms to collect news and information and send it to the seat of power. Emissaries, consuls, and ambassadors collec...

I was sorting through some of my father’s belonging recently and came across the 1941 souvenir edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Jan 8, 1941), “The March of Hawaii.” Its lead story was the reorganization and strengthening of the Pacific Fleet and the appointment of Admiral H.E. Kimmel to head it. My father acquired the paper while stationed in Hawaii with the Army Air Corps. Eleven months later the U.S. was at war, with Kimmel taking heat for having the bulk of his capital ships anchored in Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. I was reminded of the find this week while reading the news that Gannett has agreed to sell the Honolulu Advertiser to the Star-Bulletin . The two have a 130-year history of competition, somewhat muffled until they escaped their relatively difficult marriage in a joint operating agreement between 1960s and the millennium. Now the smaller paper is buying the bigger paper, if it can comply with or skirt antitrust provisions. We are now in the last throes...

An important contemporary development is the shift of media market definitions from traditional platform-based definitions to functional definitions. This is occurring because media product platform definitions are losing their specificity and uniqueness due to digitalization and cross-platform distribution developments. Newspapers are becoming news providers, delivering news and information via print, online, mobile, and other platforms; broadcasters are moving off the radio spectrum, exploiting not only other streaming and video-on-demand opportunities, but also text-based communication on web and mobile platforms. Although functional definitions clarify what companies actually do, they obscure wide differences in audiences, business relations, and revenue sources on the different platforms and give some the mistaken impression that a functionally defined operation can be successful operating the same way across the different platform environments. The functional definition is also c...

There is a growing chorus for governments to help established media transform themselves in the digital age. From the U.S. to the Netherlands, from the U.K. to France, governments are being asked to help both print and broadcast media innovate their products and services to help make them sustainable. State support for innovation is not a new concept. Support of cooperate research initiatives involving the state, higher education institutions, and industries has been part of national science and industrial policies for many decades. There has been significant state support for innovation of agriculture/food products, electronics, advanced military equipment, information technology, and biomedical technology and products. State support tends to work best in developing new technologies and industries and tends to focus support on advanced basic scholarly research through science and research funding organizations, creation and support for research parks and industrial development zones f...

The push for government support for newspaper continues and this week publishers and their supporters—including the Newspaper Association of America—went before the House Joint Economic Committee detailing how the current economic climate has harmed their finances and arguing for preferential changes to tax and pension laws. They asked to be allowed to extend application of the net operating loss provisions from 2 years to 5 years and for changes in laws to allow them to underfund pension funds for a greater period of time. Both would improve their operating performance and balance sheets. This is a case of the newspaper industry seeking long-term business benefits to solve a short-term crisis caused by poor management decisions and the recession. The leading newspaper firms and their representatives are making concerted efforts to dupe legislators and the public into believing their troubles are part of the general trends in the industry, rather than the result of management decisions...

The desire to monetize online news is leading some to enthusiastically promote micropayment systems. A number of the leading newspaper sites are leaning toward a cooperative payment system that will allow readers to use a single account to access material at the leading papers. Such a system will not be technically difficult to implement, but getting the price right will be a significant challenge because of transaction costs and significant differences in the economic value of articles. To create the best industry wide effects, a micropayment payment system would need to include as many papers as possible (see "The Challenges of Online News Micropayments and Subscriptions" http://themediabusiness.blogspot.com/2009/05/challenges-of-online-news-micropayments.html ). The fact that a consortium is currently being sought only among the major players illustrates, however, that such a system would be cost inefficient because content from smaller papers would attract fewer transacti...

Success in businesses is not the result of highly mysterious factors. To be successful an enterprise must offer a product or service that people want; it must provide it with better quality and service than other providers—or at a lower price than competitors; it must change with the times and demand; and it must never forget to focus on customer needs rather than its own. And a limited number of competitors helps. Duh. Many journalists have trouble understanding these principles, however, and we were treated to 2 classic stories in which journalists breathlessly announced this discovery over the weekend. The New York Times told us about the “resurgent” Seattle Times. The Times is starting to reap the fruits of monopoly caused by the demise of the print edition of the Post-Intelligencer and the stabilizing economy. It has picked up most of the print readers from the P-I, raised its circulation prices, and been able to keep the higher ad rates that were charged when ads were put in both...