Wednesday, December 24, 2008

McClatchy's blinders

Jeff Jarvis on McClatchy's misplaced optimism:
McClatchy shares hit 60 cents yesterday. As I write this, it’s up to a big 78 cents. Bubble! Gatehouse hit 4 cents (and I’d still short them given their current attitude); market cap: $2.3 million. See Alan Mutter’s excellent analysis of how debt did in papers. I’d say it’s more than that: It was misplaced optimism in the form and in the incumbents. If these papers had instead taken on debt to innovate and create or to buy innovates (a la the New York Times buying About), that might have been productive. Instead, they bought newspapers, which was only an indication of how snug their blinders were.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re:….how snug their blinders were….

Gary Pruitt and his ilk are like petrified dinosaurs frozen in time. If they expect a pity party, it probably can be held in a phone booth.

Anonymous said...

Billions for a desiccated KRI, which drained away resources for technology initiatives.

MNI has never embraced the fact that it is an information company caught in the whirlwind of the information revolution.

It still believes Newspapers are THE most important information provider, because that's what it says in the house ads.