Another one of them articles making them dying dinosaur sounds - puking up blood, baying, retching, moaning, suffering....
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.