- McClatchy: down 6.4%
- GCI: down 4.6%
- Belo: down 4.2%
- New York Times Co.: down 1.8%
- News Corp.: down 1.2%
- E.W. Scripps: down 1.1%
- Washington Post Co.: down 1%
- Lee: up 0.03%
Friday, February 05, 2010
Stock | Publisher shares fall anew; GCI down 5%
Nearly all newspaper publishers I follow are down in early trading today, according to Google Finance; shares of Gannett are now off nearly 25% from a recent high of $17.25. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P-500 indexes are nearly unchanged so far this morning.
3 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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Investors have realized that when the economy improves, the wash out of print advertising that occured in the recession will not come back. The best days for Gannett have passed. The model is broken. The revenue and circulation declines increase the speed of the death spiral.
ReplyDeleteThe historically flat digital revenues clearly show that the barriers to entry that newspapers once enjoyed (news collection expenses, presses, information delivery monopolies, etc.) no longer exist in a digital world.
New, more effective tools are being invented every day that will further erode the fourth estate's revenue base. With that, the ability to survive will become more and more difficult for print media companies.
It's worth noting that he slide in print advertising began before this last great recession; the recession only ramped up that trend.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Gannett and other newspaper publishers need to sharply reverse another trend: Falling online advertising sales by newspapers. Gannett breaks out revenue for the digital segment in dollars. But that's only for CareerBuilder and other purely digital subsidiaries. It does not, however, disclose the dollar value of online ad sales for its newspaper's websites. Instead, it gives percentage changes, quarter by quarter.
In the first three quarters of 2009, S.E.C. filings show, Gannett's online newspaper ad sales fell from the corresponding quarters in 2008. The declines were less than overall print ad revenue declines -- a good thing. And the trend improved over time: Third quarter online revenue at the papers fell just 19% from Q3 in 2008 vs. a 23% decline in the first quarter from the same quarter in 2008. Still, these figures should all be in the positive territory.
The specifics:
* First quarter 2009: down 23% from Q1 2008
* Second quarter: down 24%
* Third quarter: down 19%
For some reason, Gannett doesn't give this metric in its fourth-quarter/year-end 10-Qs, so it will be another three months before we know what happened in this quarter, the first of 2010.
Wait just a minute! Online ad sales numbers are bullshit. At our site, if you advertise online, you get FREE ADS IN THE PAPER THAT AD UP TO MORE THAN YOU SPEND ONLINE! So how does that come out to where they are making any money? It doesn't! It is just playing with numbers. Run on Cars.com and you get to run in the paper for FREE! So really, the online stuff is a bust. They wouldn't run online without all of the FREE ads they run in the paper, which ads up to more than they are spending online in one month. We all know it is a joke, but nobody wants to tell the Emperor he is naked, so there you go.
ReplyDelete