Posted on 02/01/2008 2:16:32 PM PST by abb
For sale: a pair of office buildings. Served as home to skeptical cranks, loudmouth jokers and coffee-stained carpet.
The Star Tribune's real estate is on the market once again, publisher Chris Harte told his staff in a memo sent Friday. The company hired a real estate broker but no deal is imminent, or even guaranteed, he wrote.
A $45 million deal that would have sold off the newspaper's three parking lots and its lesser used Freeman office building to the Minnesota Vikings collapsed five months ago amid tightening credit markets.
Harte said the deal this time may include everything, including the main office building at 425 Portland Ave., which houses the advertising staff, newsroom and publisher's office.
The newspaper was already consolidating all of its employees and operations in its main Portland Avenue building, moving its online staff and some administrative functions out of a building across the street.
News of the sale comes as the paper lives out a now well-known story for the newspaper business: a decline in circulation and revenue as both readers and advertisers turn to the web. Annual revenue at the Star Tribune is down $75 million in the last two years, according to Harte. Sales of classified ads in 2007 were half what they were at the start of the decade.
"2007 was far and away the worst year this industry has seen in anyone's memory, and it was also the worst for the Star Tribune. We were not the hardest hit large metropolitan paper in the country, but our overall revenue performance was well below the median for the industry," he had told the staff earlier last month in a previous memo.
snip
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
ping
Lots of luck. This is the worst real estate market seen in decades.
Time to lay off Nick Coleman.... thank God!
This is the worst real estate market seen in decades.
On top of that, the buildings have a strong lean to the left.
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I’d love to see Nick Coleman leave ASAP...with Lori Sturdivant following close behind!
I do have to admit that the StarTribune’s op/ed pages are no longer locked into the sanctimonious in-your-face attitude ever since Jim Boyd and Susan Albright took their buy-outs.
I expect a newspaper to criticize the GOP when they’re wrong but the whole editorial staff really seemed to go out of their collective way to stick a finger in the eye of the GOP at every chance they could get.
I’m waiting for the Washington Post to sell its building to the Russian embassy.
Oh you're not going to get rid of him that easy! I saw him pop up on the news and give his big whiny opinion. Can't remember which station.
Aw, cheer up...it won't be as bad as 2008.
Great! When that building gets torn down, I want something off of it for a trophy. Maybe the some of the black granite stone work ... what could be cooler for landscaping the place to put your trash cans on the street?
Same, or different? You decide:
1) http://www.mcclatchy.com/static/images/profiles/star_tribune/star_tribune.jpg
2) http://titanic.marconigraph.com/wireless_titanic.jpg
The sooner they go under, the better. I won’t even accept a free newspaper from them when they’re offered.
I wish a conservative investor group would buy the Strib and return it to an actual newspaper that reports FACTS instead of a liberal brainwashing delivery-system.
A pox on the Strib’s house, says I!
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