At A Loss
By Mitch Berg
McClatchy unloads the Strib at a $670 million loss.
Avista Capital Partners, an investment group focused on media, healthcare and energy companies, will pay $530 million for the newspaper, which Sacramento, Calif.-based McClatchy bought from Cowles Media Co. in 1998 for $1.2 billion.
The deal is expected to formally close sometime in the early spring. Chris Harte, a member of Avista’s advisory board, will serve as chairman of a board overseeing the Star Tribune. Harte is a former publisher of newspapers in Akron, Ohio; Portland, Maine, and State College, Pa
Word has it that McClatchy, riven with debt from its purchase of Knight-Ridder, unloaded the paper for a huge loss because the purchase is to be all or mostly cash; McClatchy needs cash.
Hey, all you dotcom survivors – how does this sound to you?
The printed daily newspaper “will be the core of our business well into the future,” Harte told hundreds of employees gathered in the Star Tribune’s largest assembly room. “But it won’t be the overwhelming majority that it is today many years from now.
Um, yeah. All you production-side people start circulating your resumes.
(Sales and contracts people – you’re probably safe…)
“You and I and everyone who works with us will have to listen carefully to our readers and our advertisers and make sure we provide them with the information and advertising they want, when they want it, how they want it,” he said. “By doing that, the Star Tribune will continue to be the dominant medium in the Twin Cities.”
I wonder what, exactly, this means? Could it mean, as Brian Ward puts it, that…:
the days are numbered for front page agenda journalism, PC blinders on important stories, insult editorials, unchecked casual plagiarism, and the willful arrogance of a self-aware monopoly …
…or not remains to be seen (and Brian’s found disheartening evidence that’s just not gonna be).
But since Avista is a venture capital company rather than primarily a media operation, maybe it’ll mean that while the Strib editorial board remains the type of caricature of liberal cabal that conservatives could scarcely design as parody, at least they’ll be run with a bottom-line focus that will mean their excesses will harm them where it hurts most – in their pocketbook (or budget).
December 28th, 2006 at 12:21 am
I used to love the Tribune when I was growing up. Eventually I changed and grew up and the Strib withered.
The very last straw, the thing that made me never even pick the damn thing up when getting an oil change, was an ‘article’ (not an editorial) I read in that damn paper about 6 years ago that clamined that man made global warming would dry up Minnesota’s lakes. It took till around paragraph 50 to read that there was no evidence that this was actually occuring and that no computer models predicted it, just that it might possibly happen.
Now think about it, the editors almost certainly decided to run the story, even though there was no evidence, because people needed to be pushed in the ‘correct’ direction. The realization made me feel sick at all the ‘correct’ bullshit I had ingested over the years
It will take a lot to bring me back.