Categories: Newspaper Agonistes

The Underlying Reality Of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. And The New York Times

Posted by: Jon Fine on April 02

The New York Times Co’s market cap is down to $720 million, as I write this, and the day’s tides of media and commentary bring in, virtually every day, pre-obituaries…

Hearst Lays Down Gauntlet For San Francisco Chronicle, Threatens Sale Or Closure Without Significant Cuts And Union Concessions.

Posted by: Jon Fine on February 24

My half-bright idea from the early summer of 2007 was that Hearst should shutter the San Francisco Chronicle’s print edition and go all digital, at some point in the next…

In Which I Aggregate Too Many Partially-Related Thoughts About Paying For News Online, Micropayments, And Newspapers

Posted by: Jon Fine on February 19

At times I have way too many things—whether they’re wise or wooly-headed—to say about any given topic to cram into the space allotted for my column. This is one of…

News Corp Posts First Quarterly Loss In Three Years; 14 Laid Off At Wall Street Journal, And The Relative Performance of The WSJ and the New York Times

Posted by: Jon Fine on February 05

A grand coincidence? Well, yeah, actually. Judging from the dynamics for virtually any comparable major media outlet (and especially one that gets the bulk of its revenues from print), you…

Arguments Why Journalism School Professors Should Not Be Quoted Regarding The Business Of Newspapers

Posted by: Jon Fine on January 13

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s own (excellent) reporting on the news that its parent company Hearst Newspapers is alloting but 60 days to sell it: Tim Pilgrim, a journalism professor at…

A Note On The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, And A Note On Vacation Schedule

Posted by: Jon Fine on December 13

I’m away on vacation until the middle of next week, which is why I’m only now getting around to blogging about what looks like will happen to MediaNews Group’s Detroit…

Dan Savage Offers Simple, Candid, NSFW Way For Daily Newspapers To Save Themselves

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 12

David Hirschman of Mediabistro (which—disclosure time!—was founded by my wife, Laurel Touby) just put online an excellent interview with Dan Savage, noted sex colunist and editorial director of the Seattle…

More On That Speech Given By Dean Singleton: An Interesting Perspective From A Commenter Who Used To Work For Him

Posted by: Jon Fine on July 16

Commented DDDenver, who identifies him- or herself as a former newspaper new media type, posted a frank and sharp response to this post concerning MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton’s recent…

Big-City Newspapers And Their Real Estate

Posted by: Jon Fine on March 28

I still don’t understand why more major-market newspapers aren’t doing this. The big-city daily typically owns a huge chunk of prime downtown real estate, which was bought, built and developed…

More Discouraging News About Newspapers

Posted by: Jon Fine on December 06

Yesterday a bunch of newspaper companies gave presentations to investors at an annual confab sponsored by UBS. The news, as you might expect, was not particularly heartening, but perhaps the…

Kevin Martin: Savvy Political Operator. Less Savvy When It Comes To Policy

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 13

When he was running the FCC, Michael Powell did not lack for grand plans to deregulate most of everything. He did not succeed in doing so. But his successor, Kevin…

Burying The Lede. And Burying The News Just Before A Holiday Weekend

Posted by: Jon Fine on August 31

The Newspaper Association of America issued a press release today,the Friday before Labor Day, which hit my inbox at precisely 12:43 PM, Eastern time. First paragraph: Arlington, Va. – Advertising…

Scripps Cuts Out The Middle Option In Cincinnati

Posted by: Jon Fine on July 17

So I’ve been blathering and blogging about which major market newspaper will be the first to go online only, not today, but someday soon … .and today the…

Newspaper Triage: Which American Paper Will Be The First To Kill Its Print Edition?

Posted by: Jon Fine on July 12

I spent several days last week asking a bunch of newspaper execs and other assorted smart folk variant of the following question: “Which American newspaper will be the first to…

News Corp’s Peter Chernin On Newspapers Circa Right Now

Posted by: Jon Fine on April 27

Earlier this week, the Milken Institute sponsored a media conference (there is one every week—scratch that, there is more than one every week. And there is more than one in…

Not What The New York Times Co. Wants In The News Just Before Its Annual Meeting

Posted by: Jon Fine on April 20

(from the ever-firewalled Wall Street Journal, emphasis added) Amid a declining market for print advertising, publishers have increasingly pointed to the growth in their online ad revenues. But New York…

David Geffen and the Los Angeles Times: The Answer Is Still ‘No.’

Posted by: Jon Fine on April 03

UPDATE 4/6: Oooh—thesis below turns out to be wrong. Or at least incomplete. For a correction, an explanation, a mea culpa, and a couple of additional questions, read this post….

Whoa. Just: Whoa.

Posted by: Jon Fine on March 20

The New York Times Co. reports its February revenues. It is not pretty: The New York Times Company announced today that in February 2007 advertising revenues from continuing operations decreased…

The Music Business Is Unbundling The Song. Now The Newspaper Business Unbundling The Paragraph

Posted by: Jon Fine on March 08

The Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens’ writes today about how the tiny local newspaper remains a good business. (My BusinessWeek colleague Tom Lowry previously did an excellent piece on the same…

Liz Smith Bites The Hand That Feeds

Posted by: Jon Fine on February 01

“I love magazines more than anything. I think they’re even more important than newspapers, which are generally pretty inept.” —Syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, whose column appears in scores of…

TV Stations: Easier To Sell Than Newspapers

Posted by: Jon Fine on January 05

The New York Times Co.’s sale of its broadcast TV stations suggests that sale multiples for broadcast tv stations—in this case, major-network affiliated TV stations primarily located in mid-sized markets—are…

McClatchy: Bad Timing?

Posted by: Jon Fine on December 08

McClatchy Newspapers now getting whacked by the big bet they made on Knight Ridder. From the most recent research report on the company from Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich (known…

Newspapers And Yahoo, Their Star Reporters, And The Future Thereof

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 20

Today in the news we have: —A very broad hook-up between Yahoo and over 170 newspapers, encompassing help-wanted classifieds and local news and search. These talks had been brewing for…

Los Angeles Times, Britney Spears Offer Case Studies In Media Management!

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 08

Surely it’s entirely coincidental that Britney Spears and the Los Angeles Times (and by extension Tribune Co.) both essentially buried bad news by putting it out there yesterday. I mean,…

Scanning The Headlines

Posted by: Jon Fine on October 26

Three random media media headlines of the past 24 hours or so, lightly edited for clarity: Welch, Others, Mull Private Bid For NYT’s Boston Globe (Parenthetically: The Boston Globe may…

Journalism Ethics Can Be Funny! Santa Barbara Saga Continues

Posted by: Jon Fine on July 14

The recurring phrase “former food writer” herein totally cracks me up, in part because it’s a pretty hilarious putdown, and in part because it double-underlines the letter’s high-handed tone. The…

Regarding ‘Today’s Dishonest Attack On The Times’: Ex WSJ-er And Current NYT-er Fires Back at WSJ Editorial Page

Posted by: Jon Fine on June 30

(Gardiner Harris, who sent the following email in response to this bizarre, inflammatory and very lengthy editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, spent a few years at the Journal before…

Newspaper Companies: Who’s Next?

Posted by: Jon Fine on June 15

The short answer: maybe Gannett. To a lesser extent, possibly Journal Register. The realer answer: probably nobody, at least for now. Most of the publicly traded newspaper companies either have…

When The Brits Are The Early Adopters …

Posted by: Jon Fine on May 30

… you begin to suspect the US might be really screwed. If I recall correctly, in Hammer of the Gods Robert Plant was quoted as being all…

Tony Ridder Was Right

Posted by: Jon Fine on February 01

Davis “Buzz” Merritt, a former top editor at Knight Ridder’s Wichita Eagle, last year wrote a book called Knightfall: Knight Ridder and how the erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting…

Wish We’d Thought Of It First Department

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 28

While I was gone last week, Slate.com’s Jack Shafer posted this amazing future autopsy on where Google went wrong. While in Shafer’s scenario both Amazon and Google hubris play a…

Knight Ridder Makes It Official

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 14

Sort-of confirming an earlier report (in one of its own newspapers!) that was sort-of retracted later* Knight Ridder announced today it will explore “strategic alternatives.” The company will be all…

Newspaper Circulation: The Good(?) News

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 08

The latest circulation results for newspapers, courtesy of Audit Bureau of Circulations, reveal an interesting tiering effect. The biggest-of-the-big held on reasonably well; the major metros just below them got…

Knight Ridder Agonistes

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 02

A major newspaper investor is rattling his saber, loudly, over at Knight Ridder. That investor—Bruce Sherman, who heads up Private Capital Management LP— just got a hell of a lot…

The One Thing To Watch For At Dow Jones

Posted by: Jon Fine on November 02

The good news is that Dow Jones’ stock outperformed market indices in the last week of October. The bad news is it’s hard to tell whether this was driven by…

On Newsprint (As Quickly And Painlessly As Possible)

Posted by: Jon Fine on October 12

Some day-after coverage of the Wall Street Journal’s decision to shrink its physical dimensions by about 20% focuses, smartly, on newsprint costs. (No. Wait. Don’t go away yet.) The dynamic…

Weakend

Posted by: on October 11

Evidently, Karen Elliott House is happy even as Bill Keller sneers, but, man, is the new Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal awful or what? Since two different people…