Posted on 04/14/2008 3:31:41 PM PDT by abb
CHICAGO Media General Inc.'s Florida Communications Group, parent of The Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV, said Monday it is offering voluntary buyouts to about half of its 1,326 employees.
Group President John Schueler said in an announcement on the Tribune's TBO.com Web site that the buyouts are a way to cut costs significantly in the difficult economic climate of Tampa Bay.
Media General, in its latest financial report, said much of the chain's difficulties can be traced to its Tampa Bay media properties. The region, and all of Florida, has been hurt badly by a housing collapse that has spread pain throughout many other industries.
Media General is facing a proxy showdown at its annual meeting later this month with Harbinger Capital Partners, a big shareholder group that argues the Richmond, Va.-based newspaper publisher and broadcast owner has not done enough to contain costs. Harbinger has suggested selling the Tribune, which Media General has said would be foolish.
The Tampa buyout program includes severance packages that for some employees could go as high as 39 weeks of pay.
Layoffs are possible if not enough employees accept the buyouts, Schueler said.
Other media properties included in the buyout offer are Sunbelt Newspapers, Suncoast News, Hernando Today, Highlands Today, and Centro Grupo de Comunicacion.
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's editor-at-large.
excellent news
Damn. Forgot part of the title.
Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™
ping
To: liberal papers,DIE YOU MISRABLE BASTARDS DIE.
http://blogs.tampabay.com/media/2008/04/media-generals.html
Half of Employees at WFLA-Ch. 8, Tampa Tribune and Other Tampa-Area Outlets Offered Buyouts By Media General Subsidiary
Mediageneralvig UPDATE: Florida Communications Group president John Schueler confirmed to me moments ago that the company will offer buyouts to half its 1,326 employees, including people who work at WFLA-Ch. 8, TBO.com, The Tampa Tribune Spanish-language CENTRO, Hernando Today, Sunbelt Newspapers and a host of other smaller daily and weekly
snip
A good conservative publisher should step-up to the plate and start a nice, local, conservative rag. I bet it would do well in the TB area. Lots of good conservative folks in that part of the country.
Related.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-went-wrong-at-jrc.html
our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction
Sunday, April 13, 2008
What went wrong at JRC
Teetering near default on a tower of debt and days from being booted off the Big Board, Journal Register Co. shows how strategic missteps and bad luck can imperil even as good a business as this highly profitable chain of community newspapers.
For all that’s wrong with JRC – and there is a quite lot, to be sure – the company’s 19.3% operating profit not only compares quite favorably with those of several of the largest Fortune 500 corporations but actually surpasses the margins of such giants as Chevron (18.5%), Wal-Mart (7.5%) and General Motors (3.5%).
The ability of JRC to continue generating rich profits at a time of unprecedented contraction in the newspaper business is the direct legacy of the rigorous expense management enforced by Robert Jelenic, the chief executive who ran the company for two decades until he resigned in November to undergo cancer treatment.
snip
buyouts... Leftists are good at sabotaging jobs and paying people not to work.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/corporate/article453706.ece
Tribune parent’s fighting gets ugly
By Eric Deggans, Times TV/Media Critic
Published Friday, April 11, 2008 10:07 PM
Media General took the proxy fight over seats on its board of directors to a new level Thursday, e-mailing a letter to the company’s 7,000 employees with instructions on how they could vote against three directors proposed by the hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners.
The growing conflict has placed performance of Media General’s Tampa outlets such as WFLA-Ch. 8, the Tampa Tribune newspaper and
TBO.com center stage, as Harbinger contends that the company should consider selling those platforms to stabilize its stock value.
Calling the Tampa outlets “one of our crown jewel assets,” Media General president and CEO Marshall N. Morton urged employees Thursday to “simply throw out” materials sent to them by Harbinger after reading them and to vote for the company’s slate of directors.
Employees receive stock in Media General as the company’s contribution to their 401(k) retirement plan.
Media General spokesman Ray Kozakewicz said the letter was an update on recent developments, including Morton’s reaction to an investor forum held April 1 featuring presentation from representatives of Harbinger and Media General.
snip
Actually the Tribune used to be the conservative rag, at least compared to the very liberal St. Pete Times which is the other major paper in the area. The Trib has “leaned” a little more liberal in recent years, but still, compared to the Times, it’d be considered right wing, LOL.
WFLA, guess it’s only the TV portion...I guess WFLA radio isn’t in the group, just the TV station. But WFLA radio station is the station that carries Rush, Beck and Hannity.
The Trib has been in Tampa St. Pete forever.
It has ALWAYS gotten the stories wrong.
I dated a writer there and visited the place along the Hillsboro River. All the equipment you could want then they go and produce a crappy newspaper.
Not quite as liberal as the St.Pete Times, but the Trib gets the facts wrong much more often.
What's really killing the Trib is the neighboring St. Pete Times, which, as an example..sells it's Sunday paper in Tampa for 50 cents...and it's basically the same thing as the Trib?
related.
Newspaper Vendors Worry About Downturn
By Seth Sutel
Published: April 14, 2008 10:20 AM ET
WASHINGTON As newspaper publishers build up their online operations and struggle through an advertising slump, one group is worried about being left behind - the folks who make printing presses and other equipment used to make newspapers.
Hoping to allay some of those concerns, a panel of four CEOs of major newspaper companies addressed a group of equipment vendors Sunday at an annual convention of industry suppliers called NEXPO.
“We, too, are feeling the pain,” said panel moderator Dennis Nierman, president of AlfaQuest Technologies Inc., referring to the steady revenue declines that are plaguing the industry.
Nierman, whose company makes a product that allows printing plates to be made from digital files, said it was “discouraging” to see the exhibition floor relatively empty, as it was for part of the day Saturday, the first day of the show.
George Irish, president of Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division, noted that his company had $250 million committed to printing press updates, with more on the way. Dean Singleton, CEO of Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc., said his company spent $500 million on press-related products over the past three years.
Still, many publishers are increasingly focusing their efforts on building up online advertising revenues, which are growing rapidly even as print advertising declines.
So far, the gains in online ads are far from making up the shortfalls in print advertising. Making up the difference is currently the No. 1 topic in the newspaper industry.
Last year, overall newspaper advertising fell 7.9 percent, including a 9.4 percent falloff in print advertising, offset somewhat by an 18.8 percent increase in online advertising, according to the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group.
The NAA is holding its own conference concurrently with the vendors’ exhibition in Washington, which also coincides with the annual meetings of The Associated Press and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Gary Pruitt, chief executive of The McClatchy Co., the No. 3 newspaper company by circulation, told the audience that the online business held particular allure for publishers since it doesn’t require gas for trucks or other expenses needed to distribute physical newspapers.
Singleton, whose company owns The Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and other newspapers, said he expected online advertising to make up 20 percent of his company’s revenues by 2012, up from 7.5 percent today. Singleton is also chairman of The Associated Press.
All four CEOs on the panel, which also included Michael Reed, the CEO of GateHouse Media Inc., participate in a consortium of publishers cooperating with Yahoo Inc. in an effort to build up their online advertising.
Singleton, a principal driver of the industry’s effort to work with Yahoo, said one of the factors holding newspapers back from making more money online is the difficulty they have in offering highly targeted ads.
Under the Yahoo system, which is starting to roll out over the next several months, ads could be targeted to, say, a female reader who is shopping for a specific kind of appliance. Currently, that kind of targeting is difficult for newspapers to do on their own, Singleton said.
As a result, the standard rates that newspapers can charge for reaching 1,000 readers of printed newspapers are “many times” higher than reaching an equivalent amount of online readers, Singleton said.
Also, newspapers have relatively few competitors in a given market for print advertising, while there are many competitors offering online ads.
One of the ironies of newspapers’ current predicament is that even while their revenues shrink, their total audience - including both print and online readers - is growing. The trick is figuring out how to make more money online.
“While ad revenue may be the best predictor of short-term performance - and that’s lousy; there’s no way around that, it is lousy,” Pruitt said, “longer-term, I’m quite optimistic, because total audience is growing, and we will be monetizing that.”
the Trib is more center/right leaning than the SP Times, especially in the Editorial Dept.
As newspaper publishers build up their online operations and struggle through an advertising slump, one group is worried about being left behind - the folks who make printing presses and other equipment used to make newspapers.Those folks ought to peddle their junk to Eurotrash Luddites who continue to make quite of show out of buying obsolete "big iron."
Scrap steel prices are pretty high right now.
http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6538464.html
Scrap steel prices bounce back
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