Yes, It's Business — Ours (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

Thursday, this newspaper's current owner, the Chicago-based Tribune Co., announced that it had hired Merrill Lynch and Citigroup to give financial advice on the troubled company's future.

Along with Tribune's managers, the two Wall Street firms will present "strategic alternatives" to a special six-member committee of the company's independent directors. That group, by the way, said Thursday that it has retained its own legal counsel. The company, meanwhile, told reporters that the committee will make its recommendations to the full board by year's end.

Among the alternate futures likely to be considered are sale of the entire company, dispersal of some of its parts — individually or in combination — and a leveraged buyout by management and private equity investors. Other proposals almost surely will emerge, because once a Fortune 500 company puts itself up for sale, surprises tend to abound. Avarice is seldom charitable, but it is inexhaustibly ingenious.

In a statement, Tribune Chief Executive Dennis FitzSimons said that "in order to maximize shareholder value, our initial focus is determining the best strategic alternatives for the company and its publishing and broadcast groups as a whole, before evaluating strategic alternatives for individual business units."

Value in this case means money, and a "business unit" is what you are holding in your hands, though the sentimental among us usually refer to it as a newspaper.

The Los Angeles Times, in fact, is Tribune's largest business unit and accounts for roughly a quarter of its publishing revenue.

Corporate executives like to talk about "unlocking value." Taken as a whole, analyst Edward Atorino of the Benchmark Co. told Reuters this week, Tribune might be worth as much as $14 billion. Analysts, however, are skeptical that a significant fraction of that value can be unlocked by any of the alternatives now under discussion.

more gobbledygook...

WHAT'S lost in this numerical hall of mirrors with all its dead-end corridors and distorted funhouse refractions is an ethically intelligible notion of what the word "value" must mean in this context.

No one can argue that Tribune or anyone who owns The Times is obliged to lose money. On the other hand, no one should argue that a newspaper's proprietor has no obligation except to make as much money as it can. Somewhere between those two extremes is a fulcrum called responsibility on which a balance must be struck. Doing so requires the recognition that, although stockholders certainly are stakeholders in this process, so — and just as surely — are a paper's readers.

What this moment in the life of the Los Angeles Times requires is recognition that the paper's social, intellectual and political value to readers needs to be unlocked and not just its monetary value to investors.

Unless the real interests of all the stakeholders are respected, everybody will end up with a handful of nothing — maybe not tomorrow, but in the not-too-distant future. That's the substance of the principled position Johnson, Baquet and their staff have taken and of the letter a group of distinguished civic leaders recently sent to Chicago. It's a position that will have to be taken into account whether some version of the Tribune Co. continues to operate The Times or the paper passes back into local hands.

Yes, It's Business — Ours

Tim takes a snarky tone with an innuendo of expectation that FReepers mind their own business and just leave TRB alone.

...alternate futures...numerical hall of mirrors...a fulcrum...

Tim needs to hurry up and jump start his career as a SciFi novelist before Tribunesaurus sinks forever beneath the tar.

Avarice is seldom charitable, but it is inexhaustibly ingenious.

I certainly defer to Tim's experience in avarice.

Value in this case means money, and a "business unit" is what you are holding in your hands, though the sentimental among us usually refer to it as a newspaper.

Tim makes his first mistake in assuming that his readers hold anything whatsoever in their hands. FReepers also usually refer to newspaper as fishwrap.

with The Times already running a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin

The TRB fiction that passes for a margin comes from burying Expense in Goodwill/Intangibles.

Most estimates put The Times' monetary value at $2.5 billion

TRB's latest 10-Q shows Shareholder's Equity of $6.7 bln. Subtracting out Expense carried as Goodwill at $5.9 bln along with Intangibles at $2.8 bln gives TRB a Net Shareholder's Equity of -$2.0 bln. The mortgaged to the hilt FUBAR known as TRB leaves shareholders feeling like they bought an opaque cookie jar full of IOUs in place of cookies along with an open invoice for the jar itself.

everybody will end up with a handful of nothing

TRB shareholders already own a smoking crater the size of Tycho full of nothing.

BTW FWIW. Despite my many political differences with both Buffet and WPO it occurs to me that Buffett's conservative management style helped WPO retain a relatively strong balance sheet.

More dinosaur caterwauling...

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/columnists/hc-hunter1001.artoct01,0,4602785.column?coll=hc-utility-opinion

Rumors Of Paper's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

Karen Hunter
Reader Representative

October 1 2006

The fourth-quarter blues. Over the past four years, the feeling has become inevitable at The Courant.

This year, however, I had planned to ignore the anxiety that seeps into the newsroom in the fall, when managers begin counting heads and analyzing the amount of space given to news stories in an effort to meet next year's budget expectations.

My concern, after all, is fairness and accuracy of news coverage. No one has yet announced layoffs in the newsroom, although NE will be shut down. Readers don't worry about The Courant's budget, at least not until they can't find their favorite sections, local reporters or must-read columnists in the newspaper.

This year, however, the discontent in some newsrooms owned by Tribune, The Courant's parent company, has reached new levels. After the publisher and the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Johnson and Dean Baquet, refused to cut their staff further as Tribune had directed, cheers could be heard in newsrooms throughout the country.

The movement spread to the Baltimore Sun, where last week 100 employees signed a letter to visiting CEO Dennis FitzSimons asking that Tribune "treat those of us who work here with the respect we deserve and make sure that The Sun has the resources it needs to maintain the quality that has allowed it to thrive. Either that, or sell The Sun to someone who will."

Courant staff members, as well as journalists at other newspapers where cuts have had a demoralizing effect, found a spokesman in staff writer Rinker Buck, who wrote an open letter to president and soon-to-be publisher Stephen Carver. The letter, published on the website of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, made it clear Courant "employees reject the strategy of publishing an inferior paper."

Lately, it has been difficult to walk through The Courant's newsroom without bumping into a discussion about the newspaper's future. Wednesday's front-page story "Courant In Rumor Mill" about Tribune's financial troubles and possible buyers of The Courant brought a few readers into the discourse.

One reader's response was simple and direct: "Hooray - if The Courant is sold, maybe we'll finally see some balanced reporting (toward the conservative side) and some REAL local coverage."

Richard Gobeille of Simsbury took the opportunity to write, "Despite arguments to the contrary, The Courant is slowly dying off - in pieces." He listed the losses that countless readers have complained about over the years: Parade, NE, a local movie reviewer, pages of local news, seasoned editorial writers. The enhancements, such as At Home and Place, are rarely part of the discussion.

"Tribune has gathered together a host of news outlets," Gobeille wrote, "maybe in hopes of creating one single national newspaper, albeit without the much-needed recognizable regional bias that marks a newspaper like The Hartford Courant. ... All this does not bode well for The Courant, nor does it further the dissemination of important information necessary to the education of the public in general. ... It pains me to watch a once great newspaper die. I saw a number of daily newspapers die off in New York City after the forced resolution of a newspaper strike some decades ago. Losing any serious daily media source wasn't good then - and it most certainly isn't good now. Somehow, in my sadness, I almost feel the need to send flowers."

Do not send flowers yet. Yes, it is painful - for the news staff as well as readers - to watch the industry wrestle with its identity as Wall Street analysts and Internet enthusiasts circle, but The Courant's heart is still beating.

The anxiety at some Tribune-owned newsrooms has turned to hope for a local owner, one who understands the importance of the relationship between a newspaper and its community, one who knows that the only way for news organizations to thrive, to be able to continue to provide meaningful and important information to citizens, is to have the courage to invest in the future and that when that happens readers will follow, whether it's through the Internet, podcasts or the newspaper placed at their front door.

Despite the uncertainty, the news staff is pushing forward. Editors, clerks, photographers, online producers and reporters are brainstorming and planning a Courant that will continue to be meaningful to readers. Among coming changes is a beefed-up elections staff - thanks to the disintegration of NE - and new features in two weeks in the Business, Life and Connecticut sections and at courant.com.

The anxiety that marks the fourth quarter is not exaggerated, but The Courant is still kicking.

Karen Hunter, The Courant's reader representative. Contact her at 860-241-3902 or from outside the Hartford area at 800-524-4242, Ext. 3902, or by e-mail at readerep@courant.com.

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