How do you sell a business magazine that lost $43 million last year? Convince buyers that they could fire 20 percent of the staff without missing a beat.
That’s part of the pitch Evercore Partners has been making to investors on behalf of McGraw-Hill, which wants to dump BusinessWeek. Look out, copy editors!
The cash-strapped New York Times, which has put the Boston Globe and its other New England properties up for sale, wants you to know that it’s in no way having a fire sale. Boston Globe employees appeared to have taken that message at face value.
Have you bought a Kindle? Do you plan on buying a Kindle? If you answered yes to either question, you’re part of a not-that-small group: JP Morgan estimates that some 10 million Americans either own one of Amazon’s e-book readers or plan to get one soon. Meanwhile, whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its DX reader?
The New York Times is getting out of the radio business. Did you know the New York Times was in the radio business? Exactly. Anyway, now it’s not. The cash-strapped publisher has sold WQXR-FM for $45 million, carving up the asset into two packages for different buyers–local NPR affiliate WNYC and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Radio. The money will go to paying down the paper’s debt: Not much, but more than the company may get for the Boston Globe.
Stressed about making tomorrow morning’s deadline to submit a bid for the Boston Globe? No worries! The New York Times, which is selling the paper it bought in 1993, is telling prospective buyers to take their time. Goldman Sachs, which is running the auction for the Times, had originally told bidders to submit their offer by July 8. But as of last night, that deadline has been pushed back, with no new deadline to replace it.
Good news, Boston Globe fans: Your paper is going to remain extant. Probably. Bad news, Boston Globe editorial workers: You’re getting a 23 percent pay cut.
Remember a month ago, when the New York Times said it had reached an agreement with a holdout union at the Boston Globe, which would prevent a shutdown of the Times-owned paper?
Scratch that. Deal’s off.
I don’t usually write about writers landing jobs, but I did want to point out that Jeff Bercovici, last seen writing the Mixed Media blog for Portfolio.com, has landed at DailyFinance, a site run by Time Warner’s AOL. Why do I care? Because it’s yet another sign that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters to bulk up its sites as other publishers are slimming down or shutting down. And because it’s a nice change of pace from layoff stories.
Even under the best of circumstances, Amazon’s new Kindle DX wouldn’t “save the newspaper business.” But since the newspapers are desperate to protect their dying print business, this thing may never get off the ground at all.
The Boston Globe can keep printing. The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, has reached an agreement with the Boston Newspaper Guild, the paper’s lone holdout union. A new deal involves pay cuts and “modifications to the lifetime job guarantee provisions,” but will allow the paper to stay afloat, for now.
The New York Times, which had threatened to shut down the Boston Globe unless that paper’s unions agreed to major concessions, says it got what it needed from the Globe’s workers after all.
Once exception: The Globe’s unionized editorial employees, who have yet to come to terms with the paper’s owner. The Times make ominous sounds about what might happen–“evaluating our alternatives”–but nothing specific.
Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears. But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company saw ad sales drop 27 percent, and the Internet no longer helps: Web ad sales were down 6.1 percent. The company says to expect more of the same, for a while.
Last year, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller told the newspaper’s newsroom that he would try very hard to not fire any of them. But he didn’t say anything about pay cuts. The Times today announced that it would be cutting salaries of its nonunion employees from 2.5 percent to 5 percent, and that it would be asking for “similar” cuts from its unionized newsroom workers “in a spirit of shared sacrifice and as a way to otherwise avoid layoffs in the newsroom.” It has also laid off 100 employees from its business operations.
One of the supposed buyers for the New York Times’s stake in the Boston Red Sox–one of the few assets the paper can unload as it tries to bail itself out of a cash crunch and looming debt problem–says he’s not buying.
The New York Times is running low on cash but has a $400 million debt payment due next spring. How to foot the bill? Raise money anywhere it can. Last month, the Times cut its dividend, a move that could save it up to $100 million a year. Now the paper is looking to borrow against its new Manhattan headquarters: It has hired a real estate firm to raise up to $225 million using the value of the building as collateral.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
Don't miss a post! Sign up for our Daily Email and get AllThingsD.com delivered each day.
Get columns, blogs and video from D and All Things Digital on your iPhone. Download now »
