Tribune May Revenue Falls 11.1 Percent

CHICAGO (AP) -- Media conglomerate Tribune Co. said Wednesday its revenue fell 11.1 percent in May as advertising declined in both print and broadcast segments. The company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and 23 television stations, said consolidated revenue for the period ended May 27 dropped to $406 million from $457 million in the prior year.

Publishing revenue fell 10.3 percent to $292 million from $325 million last year, as advertising revenue fell 11.8 percent to $230 million. Circulation revenue dropped 6.2 percent on lower single-copy sales and selective discounting in home delivery.

Retail ad revenue slid 1 percent, while national advertising revenue dropped 17.9 percent.

Classified ad revenue tumbled 20 percent, with real estate dropping 30 percent on significant declines in the Florida, Chicago and Los Angeles markets.

The company's broadcasting and entertainment group saw revenue fall 13 percent to $114 million. Television revenue slid 11 percent, with lower automotive, movie and political advertising partially offset by strength in retail and telecom/wireless categories. Tribune said the results also reflected fewer Cubs home games in the latest period versus last year.

Questions or comments about this story should be directed to Damian J. Troise at 212-621-7190.

Thanks for a TRB thread to give me the opportunity to post an older story from a couple of weeks ago.

Democrat Durbin "has seen no problems arising from cross-ownership in Chicago" where the Tribune used Republican Jack Ryan's divorce for a political hit job while totally ignoring Democrat John Kerry's divorce.

Senate Democrats Meet Over Tribune Sale
Wednesday June 13, 11:42 am ET
By Dennis Conrad, Associated Press Writer

Illinois Senator Seeks Prompt FCC Action Regarding Tribune Co. Sale

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Democratic leaders met with Tribune Co. officials and its prospective buyer over concerns that federal regulators have not issued a decision regarding the company's ownership of different media in the same markets.

Chicago real estate billionaire Sam Zell, who wants to take Tribune private in an $8.2 billion deal, described Tuesday's meeting as "wonderful" after leaving the Capitol office of Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois' highest ranking member of Congress.
Zell declined to detail the discussions, but said it was "very important" to secure regulatory waivers from the Federal Communications Commission. Tribune Chairman and CEO Dennis FitzSimons and other company officials did not comment as they left the Capitol.
Tribune has requested waivers from rules banning same-market ownership of television and newspapers.
The Chicago-based company, which owns 11 daily newspapers and 23 TV stations, has temporary waivers to operate broadcast and newspaper outlets in the same cities despite the ban. With a sale, it no longer would have a grandfathered exemption from cross-ownership rules in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Hartford, Conn., and Fort Lauderdale-Miami.
Nearly a month ago, Durbin wrote a joint letter with Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Chicago, that urged the FCC to make prompt decisions regarding the sale. It was signed by most members of Illinois' congressional delegation.
"There's a lot at stake here -- 20,000 employees, their future, is on the line," Durbin, the Senate's majority whip and second-highest ranking Democrat, said Tuesday, complaining that there has been no FCC response to the delegation's letter.
FCC spokesman David Fiske said an agency response should go out soon.
"We always appreciate input (from lawmakers)," he said.
Meantime, the Teamsters Union filed comments that called on the FCC to make sure local and diverse views are protected before approving any waivers.
"Including a voice for employee owners is necessary to tie the interests of the company to the local communities it serves," said James P. Hoffa, general president of the union that represents about 2,000 Tribune employees.
A phone message seeking comment from a Tribune spokesman was not immediately returned Tuesday.
Critics of the $8.2 billion deal have argued that the media conglomerate should be broken up to avoid the cross-ownership that now exists in the five cities. A public interest law firm, Media Access Project, and the Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Public Representation have urged federal regulators to deny Tribune's request for waivers.
Durbin said he, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and the Senate Democrats' caucus vice chairman, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, agree the FCC should rule promptly, but without lawmakers pushing one side.
"This has been an issue that's been debated for 10 years or more, and the FCC ultimately will have to resolve it," he said of cross-ownership.
Durbin said in more than 20 years in Illinois politics, he has seen no problems arising from cross-ownership in Chicago, where the Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune, WGN radio and TV stations.
"I don't find any monopoly power being pushed into the market, and I think most people in the market feel ... that they're really good sources of news," he said.
"The world of media is changing with the Internet, the diminished role of newspapers, with the proliferation of television stations, cable and network," he added. "We have to take care that we don't judge today's market with yesterday's standards."
Durbin said whatever he and other Democratic leaders do it is going to be done in strict compliance with FCC rules and in the open, with no "back-channel efforts."

Death spiral — 1. Revenue drops 2. Staff is cut 3. Content suffers as a result of cuts 4. Drop in circulation due to content 5. Drop in revenue due to drop in circulation 6. Prices of ads and delivered products are raised 7. Revenue drops even more, puzzling the staff who never studied supply and demand. They blame Gen X-ers and bad public education. 8. Owners gather to plan more staff cuts Once the dinosaur fishwrap execs get used to the taste of the blood of their fired employees. Future firings will be easier and will serve as serial punishment for their peons, whenever bad results are reported.

The execs/high priests and priestesses will become blood thirsty and will gladly be Aztec High Priests in their dealings with their underlings. They will eagerily use human sacrifices/firings to appease the evil Gods of the business world. Top management knows that there is no place for them to run to for a big paycheck. So they will gladly sacrifice the peons under them to stay employed until they too are sacrificed.

Now every fishwrap employee is just one personality conflict away from being sacrificed to the Fishwrap Gods, er, fired.

(Reposted to fix a broken link.)

Seems like a good place to recap some fishwrapper feelings about reversing dinomedia's fortunes.

Neil Henry feels reparations from Google could provide for fishwrap's financial needs. (Henry's hyperinflated sense of self worth may interest conservatism_IS_compassion.)

... There certainly won't be any less news or fewer scandals to report, mind you: Only fewer trained watchdogs on hand to do the hard work of hunting, finding and reporting it. ...
... [Zell] likened Google and Yahoo to modern- day pirates ripping off treasure produced by others. ...
... It is no longer acceptable for Google corporate executives to say that they don't practice journalism, they only work to provide links to "content providers." Journalism is not just a matter of jobs, and dollars and cents lost. It is a public trust vital to a free society. It stands to reason that Google and corporations like it, who indirectly benefit so enormously from the expensive labor of journalists, should begin to take on greater civic responsibility for journalism's plight. Is it possible for Google to somehow engage and support the traditional news industry and important local newspapers more fully, for example, to become a vital part of possible solutions to this crisis instead of a part of the problem?
Is it not possible for Google and other information corporations to offer more direct support to schools of journalism to help ensure that this craft's values and skills are passed on to the next generation? ...
... Is it not possible for these flourishing corporations to assist and identify more closely with the work of venerable organizations, such as the Society of Professional Journalists, in support of their mission and to preserve this important calling? I like to think such things are possible. Meantime, I can't help but fear a future, increasingly barren of skilled journalists, in which Google "news" searches turn up not news, but the latest snarky rants from basement bloggers, fake news reports from government officials and PR cleverly peddled in the guise of journalism by advertisers wishing only to sell, sell, sell.

David Lazarus firmly feels that fishwrap price fixing could fend off dinomedia's inevitable fade into oblivion.

I'll come right out and say it: It's time for newspapers to stop giving away the store. We as an industry need to start charging for -- or at the very least controlling -- use of our products online. ...
.... The answer, I think, is that newspapers have to go further. They have to be prepared to charge for online access to their products just as they charge for print access. ...
.... For this to work, the entire industry would have to come together and unite in saying that the era of the free online lunch is over.
Yet that raises another problem.
"It's illegal," said Jesse Markham, an antitrust lawyer at the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster who has represented media clients. "People would go to prison if they did this. It's price fixing -- a conspiracy to charge something where you weren't charging something before." ...
... The other way around the legal problem, Markham said, would be for the newspaper industry to apply to Congress for an exemption from antitrust laws. ....
... My thinking is that this is approaching a life-or-death struggle for newspapers, and an antitrust exemption may be the only way that the industry can smoothly make the transition to a digital future.
Put simply, we need to charge a fair price for our products, and we need to do so together.
Barring that, I agree with Kirtley at the University of Minnesota. If newspapers aren't going to collectively reach into the pockets of online readers, they should at least focus their attention on other Internet players that are profiting from newspapers' content.
First off, there are the aggregators, sites like the Drudge Report and Huffington Post that pull together stories from a wide array of media sources (and charge advertisers a fee to appear beside links to content that they had nothing to do with creating). ...

Chris Daly feels that readers ought to buy shares of fishwrap stock to help keep dinomedia afloat.

... One solution would be to find a large number of affluent people who really care about upholding the highest standards in journalism. In fact, they are not hard to find. They are: THE READERS.
The existing subscriber base of both newspapers is a precious asset, one that is not realizing its full potential. The owners of both papers should take a cue from public broadcasting and launch a “pledge drive” the likes of which no one has ever seen. Instead of just sending money, the subscribers could be enlisted to buy stock. ...
... Of course, it could be objected that a lot of Times readers cannot afford to devote $2,000 to the cause. Fine. But the demographics of the Times audience would also suggest that there are plenty of Times readers who could afford quite a bit more, and I am sure that there is a minority of the readers who could buy plenty more shares. ...

Did we ever post this knee-slapper?

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=188

What Nelson Poynter can teach the Bancrofts
COMMENTARY | June 14, 2007
Shouldn’t the standards of news media ownership, as spelled out by Poynter in 1947, apply today? For starters, those standards include looking at a media property as a sacred trust and a great privilege.

By Gilbert Cranberg and Randall Bezanson
gilcranberg@yahoo.com
randy-bezanson@uiowa.edu

Let us now praise a man who is not as famous as he deserves to be – Nelson Poynter, who built the St. Petersburg (FL) Times into a journalistic and financial powerhouse and then, upon his death at 74 in 1978, bequeathed the paper, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to a school he had created rather than to his family because, he said, “I’ve never met my great-grandchildren, and I might not like them.”

That was Poynter’s waggish way of saying he believed so fervently that a newspaper is a public trust he was unwilling to run any risk of having it fall into the hands of money grubbers.

Nelson Poynter is worth recalling today as the fate of another great newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, is being decided by a family in a position to determine its future. Poynter owned almost all of his newspaper’s stock, so the option open to him of gifting it to a school or a foundation probably is not available to the Bancroft family, even if they were inclined to walk away from a fortune, because of the many other owners of Dow Jones stock.

But there is nothing to prevent the Bancrofts from acting on the principles that animated Nelson Poynter. He expressed them 60 years ago in a set of “standards of ownership” written before he and his advisers decided on a non-profit educational foundation as the vehicle to safeguard the paper. In the standards, adopted Aug. 6, 1947, he declared:

This is a guide for my heirs, trustees, executors,advisors who have any responsibilities in disposing of any of my newspsper properties and equities. These standards shall be used as a yardstick in choosing the purchaser of The St. Petersburg Times, or any other properties which I own. A fair and equitable price must be realized from my properties but my executors shall be under no obligation to sell my interests to the highest bidder, but they may accept any offer from any bidder for any amount deemed by them to be acceptable in view of the following:

1. Ownership or participation in ownership of a publication or broadcasting property is a sacred trust and a great privilege.
2. Any publication or broadcasting property has unusual obligations to the community in which it operates, and any new owner must be sensitive to this.
3. The owners of a publication or broadcasting station cannot compromise with the integrity of the news and information that is sold or given to the public.
4. A publication or broadcasting station must be aggressive in its service to the community, and not wait to be prodded into rendering that service. A publisher or broadcaster must share the zeal and enthusiasm for what is new each day. He does not belong as an owner unless he has such enthusiasm...

The yardsticks Nelson Poynter used to describe his preferred purchaser of the St. Pete Times could well be used by any owner contemplating sale of a media property when the foundation option isn’t feasible. To be sure, once a sale is consummated, there is little if anything that can be done to force a buyer to comply with the selection criteria. But that only reinforces the importance of careful scrutiny at the selection stage, something an owner or board of directors is perfectly free to do. If a non-complying bidder is offering a much higher price than others, that in itself may be a sign that something is amiss.

All the more reason then, as the Bancrofts try to figure out what to do with Rupert Murdoch’s offer to buy Dow Jones, for them to be advised by Nelson Poynter.

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