Friday, July 17, 2009
Happy Days Aren’t Here Again: Another Miserable Quarter for NBC
Yesterday, Google told Wall Street that its business had “stabilized” during the spring, but it may be one of the only media companies that gets to say that.
GE’s NBC Universal, for instance, just posted second-quarter results that were as bad as its first quarter. Jeff Zucker’s TV and movie unit said revenue was down eight percent, and profit down 41 percent for the three months ending June 30; in the previous quarter, revenue was only down two percent, while profit was down 43 percent.
Here comes the second round of layoffs at Microsoft, following a first round that started in January. Today’s cuts will likely end up costing about 3,000 workers their jobs. Microsoft had previously warned that it would cut up to 5,000 jobs by 2010. The good news, says CEO Steve Ballmer: The newest round means “we are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. Here’s Ballmer’s memo to the troops.
While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but they’re all in lousy shape. And while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the story that Condé Nast burned $100 million or more on this one.
Yesterday we got a sense of how bad the first quarter was for the magazine business. Today we get a report card from the newspaper industry, and it’s equally grim. Gannett saw more than a third of its publishing ad revenue disappear in the first three months of 2009.
