As the first major newspaper company to release its third-quarter earnings, McClatchy will provide a gauge on the state of an industry that has been reeling for most of the past three years.
After a deepening slump raised questions about McClatchy's survival, investors appear convinced the worst is over for the publisher of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and 28 other daily newspapers.
That's not to suggest McClatchy still doesn't face a formidable challenge as it tries to adapt to media trends that are causing readers and advertisers to eschew newspapers' print editions for the Internet.
Advertising sales — McClatchy's main source of revenue — probably still plunged by a staggering amount during the summer. But the decline isn't expected to be as steep as the first half of the year when the company's ad revenue plummeted 30 percent from 2008's levels.
And remember to check back here for the best info on McClatchy's earnings report.
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10 comments:
Look, they're still laying people off and doing it right at earnings time. They still refuse to accept questions from shareholders at their earnings conference.
This is all you need to know that they are not healthy, not recovering, and not in the pink.
Anyone who tells you otherwise should be arrested for attempted fraud.
"And remember to check back here for the best info on McClatchy's earnings report."
Uh, yeah, right.
It's the old "compared to what" strategy where there's improvement over previously disasterous earnings data. Obama uses it when the White House says job loss numbers are "better than expected." McClatchy is far from a healthy company, no matter who it spins the quarterly report.
Expect McClatchy to announce Chapter 11 tomorrow morning.
****Expect McClatchy to announce Chapter 11 tomorrow morning.****
What, what, WHAT?
Cue the Johnny Cash...Down Down Down...
Hey, MNI stock finished above $4. That's still $70 below its high in 2005.
The slimmed-down MNI's demise is put off now. Some of the individual papers will do fine, depending on the demographics of their graying populations. But devoted readers are dying off. It's just that simple.
Newspapers readers are dying off, radio's listeners are dying off, televisions viewers are dying off ... and everybody is going to the, uh, web?
Well, that's the nice easy explanation everybody would like you to believe.
The fact is - there are now 500 television stations where there used to be 3; satellite radio and on-demand music services where the used to be just radio; and as many as 20-30 weekly and daily print publications in mid-sized markets where there used to be one or two.
The "newspapers" readers are dying off is such a lazy analysis of an amazing complex situation as to be laughable. Today's consumers have so many more choices than 20 years ago, each format and each publication's total number of readers have gone down, but it's not all because of a die-off.
If a town has just a Wal-Mart, people shop only at Wal-Mart, but if a Target opens, Wal-Mart's numbers may drop by 40 percent. That doesn't mean Wal-Mart is going out of business.
In almost every single market, McClatchy operates in, it reaches the single largest group of the metro area's inhabitants of any television station, radio station or internet site. The same holds true for major dailies in almost every US city.
Of course, you can continue to believe the blogosphere's "newspapers are dead" crap or you can look at the media companies large audiences and increasingly diverse portfolios (which often include their metro area's most popular website, too) and wonder just exactly whose pumping that crap and what they're trying to distract you from.
So, 7:34, why is it that newspapers are in such terrible shape financially speaking? If they're such a juggernaut, why are they sinking? I don't see local TV or radio stations folding up shop like many newspapers and bankrupt newspaper chains.
9:24 Radio stations have cut back so much that some of them don't even have humans running them anymore. Over-the-air radio suffers like newspapers. People list to their iPods in their car or CD's or whatever. Local TV news stations have been DEVASTATED by cuts across the board. Local news stations are laying off high-paid anchors. Bureau staff is cut. Longtime reporters are now working in PR in almost every market. The difference is that folks don't talk about that the way newspapers talk about it. Newspapers are obsessed with the bad news. But it's not much different at the other media. And we haven't even talked about magazine. Or bookstores. The McClatchy paper where I work has more readers than we've ever had before. They are on the Web. And they buy our paper, hundreds of thousands of copies, every day. We don't take that for granted. But it's true.
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