Martha’s Vineyard Gazette sold to KKR co-founder Kohlberg
I’ve always been thankful that my grandparents were good at playing the real estate game. Among their unlikely coups was buying a house in the 1960′s in Edgartown, the tony enclave on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, whose exclusive address had no correspondence to their income level. If they hadn’t bought it, there’s no way that my journalist’s salary would have been able to scoop up property like that. In the more than three decades that I’ve been going there, I’ve become a regular reader of the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, the enormous broadsheet newspaper that has resisted the cost-cutting size reductions that many other newspapers in the United States have sustained.
That allegiance to the paper (and its weekly competitor, the Martha’s Vineyard Times), as well as my continuing nostalgia for my former media beat — the future of newspapers, publishing and journalism — made it all the more interesting when I read on Friday that the Reston family is selling the 164-year-old paper to Jerome Kohlberg. It’s the story that has it all for a business reader, really: Daily paper, read by rich and powerful residents who are captains of the financial world (and hopefully Reuters clients), sold to a true bigwig of the private equity world, and a strange connection to The New York Times to boot.
Richard Reston took over editing and publishing the paper, as the Times’s Jacques Steinberg relates in this 2003 story, after leaving the Los Angeles Times where he was a foreign correspondent with stints in Northern Ireland, the Soviet Union and Vietnam. His family has owned the paper since 1968, as the Vineyard Gazette reports here, when the late James “Scotty” Restonbought it from Henry Beetle Hough. Scotty Reston, of course, was a top editor at The New York Times for many years. ((In a bit of Vineyard cultural trivia, the Gazette has long been seen as the newspaper of the tourists and the seasonal visitors, while many year-round islanders favor the Times).
What strikes me as odd is the choice of buyer: Jerome Kohlberg, who co-founded the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, has another connection, once-removed, to The New York Times. Kohlberg’s son was nominated to that company’s board by Phil Falcone, the hedge fund manager at Harbinger Capital Partnerswho amassed a half-billion dollar’s worth of New York Times shares in a bid to shake up the company’s management and operations. Ultimately, Kohlberg’s son James did get nominated to the board, but Harbinger’s bet on the Times did not work out. The stock price tanked after Falcone’s move, and Harbinger since then has reduced its stake from about 20 percent to, as of this week, just above 2 percent. Kohlberg is still on the board, though Scott Galloway, the investor who came up with the Harbinger plan, has moved on.
Jerome Kohlberg is 85 and has been visiting the island from his Mount Kisco, New York home since 1943. He also appears to be taking a more friendly approach to his foray into newspapering. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
In a separate transaction, a gift has been made to Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust from a fund established by the Kohlbergs, to buy and preserve the Revolutionary War-era Gazette building and property on South Summer Street in downtown Edgartown. The Trust is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and managing island landmarks. It is anticipated that the newspaper will continue to operate from the historic building under a lease to be negotiated with the Trust.
And as the Vineyard Gazette reports, the Trust will get $1.5 million. As for the paper and the real estate, that will cost $3.5 million. Maybe hostile takeovers don’t necessarily run in the Kohlberg family.
WSJ defies newspaper ad trends
Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2 — but you sure wouldn’t know it over at The Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street Journal Publisher Les Hinton sent around an email (posted on Romenesko) touting the paper’s eye-popping 17% increase in print and online ad revenue in the quarter ending September versus the same period a year ago. Print advertising jumped 21% while online ad revenue advanced 29%.
Hinton notes that this is the Journal’s fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and attributes the rise in ad revenue to the new products and sections such as Greater New York.
Meanwhile the Journal’s main competitors, USA Today and The New York Times, are not experiencing the same lift in print. In Q2, USA Today’s paid ad pages fell. The New York Times Co., which includes the flagship Boston Globe and other regional papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida, warned that overall print ad revenue will decline around 5% while online ad revenue is expected to rise 14%.
We’ve been keep stacks of the Greater New York edition and the checks we made find the ad count slim on some days. Our informal hoard consists mainly of sections from the summer which is a light season for advertising typically. Today’s Greater New York looks thicker with ads from the jeweler Kwiat, conEdison, sister broadcast station FOX (full page) among a smattering of others.
New York Times: Honest work means honest pay
Some people hate The New York Times and some people love The New York Times — but everybody wants to read The New York Times for free. That will largely end in 2011. You probably read that today on the Internet, and you probably read it for free.
The Times said it will let you read some articles per month for free, then make you pay for more. It’s what the Financial Times does. Who said it had to be original? If you subscribe to the print edition, just keep reading it. This isn’t really about you. This is a decision that will, for better or for worse, inform the public that if you want journalists to tell you stuff or entertain you, you need to pay them to do journalism all day long.
Lots of people have opinions on this and lots of people have done the research. Even more people style themselves Internet experts. The one thing they can’t help is sharing opinions on whether news sites should charge or whether they’re not just misguided for doing it — but whether they’re stupid or criminally wrong.
Everybody knows the sins that newspapers committed online. People will tell you: “They should have done it in 1995. They should do this, they should do that. If they do this, they have to give up that. They’re old media, they deserve to die. They’re doomed. They should sell. Too little too late. It won’t move the needle. They’re doing the wrong thing. I have data, do the math.”
Many people make good points. Still, what does the Times have to lose? NYTimes.com visitors? Pageviews? Ad revenue that isn’t really doing them many favors anyway? Publishers get so much conflicting information, and, to be honest, are a bit doddering and confused — so they stand still. Things fall apart from there.
If newspapers keep giving away their news for free, the news will eventually stop coming. That’s not good. Look at it this way: you have to pay for news because you have to pay people to make it. When people say, “Screw newspapers. I get news on the Internet,” someone likely got paid to get that stuff written or photographed or shot.
Some people work for love and some for money, and most of us work for a combination of those things. I love journalism, but I need money to do it. If I can’t get money, I have to spend some or all of my day doing something different, and then I can definitely kiss my Pulitzer dreams and your enlightened mind goodbye. So it goes for the Times. They can’t staff the Times like volunteer firefighters. Nor can any paper. Beyond the calculations, consultants and chaos, that’s the story.
I am a European and while reading NYT I care only about 8-9 articles every week. Everyday I receive NYT headlines by mail and usually I read one or two articles put in the “top stories”. Generally speaking I think that frontpage articles have to be free. Frontpages are like shop windows. Do you want access to a newspaper on the whole? Pay it! NYT has to lose his influence in the world, that is bad news to journalism.
New York Times job cuts: Read the memo
The New York Times will cut 100 positions in its newsroom by the end of the year, Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff on Monday. This is the second time that the paper has taken this unfortunate step, having cut 100 positions last year (though, as Richard Perez-Pena reported in his story on nytimes.com, other positions were added so it was not a net reduction). Thing is, the TImes already cut pay for journalists and other employees this year in an attempt to forestall cuts. So… it’s not good news, but it is fit to print. Here is Keller’s memo:
Colleagues,
I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I’ve been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don’t want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.
Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.
We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.
As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.
Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.
Thursday media highlights
Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:
New York Times Asks Subscribers: Is It Wrong to Charge for Online Content? (Poynter) Bill Mitchell writes: “The New York Times is testing a price point of $5 a month for access to nytimes.com, with a 50 percent discount for print subscribers. The Times e-mailed a survey to print subscribers Thursday afternoon inviting their reaction to that pricing plan and asking a range of questions about online pricing.”
Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims (Guardian) “The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills,” writes Nick Davies. > UK police won’t reopen Murdoch paper phonetap case (Reuters)
A is for abattoir; Z is for ZULU: All in the Handbook of Journalism (Reuters) Dean Wright writes: “The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists live by — and we’re proud of it. Until now, it hasn’t been freely available to the public. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 the Reuters Foundation published a relatively short PDF online that gave some basic guidance to reporters. But it’s only now that we’re putting the full handbook online.”
As Gannett’s Newspapers Suffer, Digital Side Sees Growth, More Hiring And Acquisitions (paidContent) “As Gannett continues to be roiled with huge debt problems, an absent CEO, and hundreds more layoffs across its community newspapers, its digital division appears to be a sea of calm. In fact [...] things are going just fine on their respective ends,” writes David Kaplan.
Analyst Admits to Being ‘Dead Wrong’ After Disney’s ‘Up’ Is Big Earner (NYT) “Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. “The recent success of Pixar’s ‘Up’ (well ahead of our forecasts) has renewed investor confidence in Disney’s creative capabilities,” he added. “Up” has so far sold $265.9 million in tickets in North America and $35.4 million overseas, where it has only begun to arrive in theaters,” writes Brooks Barnes.
TiVo, Best Buy Form Alliance To Boost DVRs Available In Stores (WSJ) David B. Wilkerson writes: “Best Buy also will use TiVo’s platform to market directly to consumers, offering tips and other information to help customers get more out of the two-way possibilities TV now offers. The company said it will ‘substantially increase the levels of marketing and merchandising of retail TiVo DVR devices, as well as other devices that may feature the TiVo user interface and platform in the future.’”
Sun Valley: David Carr’s advice for reporters
The Bald Mountain resort in Sun Valley offers moguls for advanced skiers all winter long. Media reporters show up every July for the other kind of mogul, who lands among the picturesque Idaho mountains on a private jet and has a name like “Rupert Murdoch” or “Barry Diller.”
Reporters are supposed to be part of the scenery — not part of the conference itself.* They must stand around and hope that one of the more than 200 invitees decides to speak to them, and hopefully dispense a few nuggets of news. Fortunately, this week’s weather is supposed to be sunny, dry and warm during the day, and comfortably chilly at night.
For a Sun Valley freshman like this Reuters reporter, it sounds scary terrifying, despite the clement weather forecast. I asked New York Times media columnist David Carr, who covered the conference in 2007, for some advice. Here are some excerpts from our phone conversation;
Why did you go to the Sun Valley conference?
I was sent because (NYT deals columnist) Andrew Ross Sorkin was getting married. I was actually on vacation at the time, (but) Andrew is somebody at the paper who, whatever he asks for, we have to do. I was actually happy to step into the breach.
What kind of reporting do you do?
You’re arguing over real table scraps and taking deep meaning from people sitting physically adjacent to each other by the duck pond, but you can’t hear what they say… I got a big get. I saw Rupert Murdoch in a parking lot walking and talking to somebody. I can’t remember who he was talking to, but that constitutes a huge get in the context of Sun Valley. (Was it CNN’s Anderson Cooper? We don’t know.)
4,000 Boston Globe readers can’t be wrong
Next Monday is the day when members of The Boston Globe’s biggest union will vote on concessions that the paper’s owner, The New York Times Co, says are necessary to keep the paper from closing. The public relations campaign is heating up already.
The Boston Newspaper Guild published a press release on Friday about the testimonials of 4,000 Bostonians who signed an online petition to save the Globe. Their comments are stirring, but nothing talks like money.
Let’s take a look: The New York Times says it needs $20 million in cost cuts from several Globe unions. At that point, the paper will be on track to lose only $65 million this year, not the $85 million currently projected. A smaller loss, the thinking goes, might make the paper more attractive to a buyer once the Times can rustle one up.
The Boston Newspaper Guild is signaling — quite strongly — that it doesn’t like the cost concessions that it tentatively agreed to. Who would, after reading The New Yorker story quoting columnist Thomas Friedman saying that he gets leeway from the NYT to spend as much as he wants to travel wherever he wants to write whatever he wants? (The concessions include 8.3 percent pay cuts, furloughs, more flexibility with layoffs, etc.)
The Times has said that it will slash Globe staffers’ pay by 23 percent if it doesn’t get an agreement from the guild. The union has said, essentially, that the Times wouldn’t dare, and that if it did, it would take the company to court. The Times has said that it is ready to kill the paper if things spin out of control.
Here are two proposals to stop the bickering:
- Ask the 4,000 people who signed the petition to come up with $10 million instead of the guild. Ask them to each pledge $2,500. Better yet, ask them to come up with $20 million to help out all the unions. That’ll cost each petitioner $5,000. Pretty steep, but if you love the paper that much…
- How about you dig a little deeper — deep enough to get the Globe out of the hole this year? That is $85 million. That’s $21,250 each. Steep, yes, but how much do you love your paper?
No J, it wasn’t. Was your response supposed to be pointless? Or were you unable to express your reasons for calling it stupid?
Keep on rockin’ in the fee world, newspapers
It’s refreshing to read some reasoned thinking about the future of newspapers that does not come from
- Newspaper executives whose cheerleading about how they will survive — somehow — gets undercut by reporting a 30 percent drop in profits one quarter later, or
- Internet Cassandras who want newspapers to burn and die because they hate editors who get precious about how the calling of journalism trumps the rules of free markets and (more typically) because they hold dear the tradition of thinking that newspapers only print lies.
The Financial Times is the bearer of these encouraging if cautionary words in an editorial that it ran on Tuesday:
There are legitimate concerns about the disappearance of general papers. The best dig up stories and provide coverage of local, national and foreign news that enlightens readers and citizens. It is easy to undervalue such news when it has been plentiful for decades, but society would feel its absence.
Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market. When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.
The FT is not saying that all newspapers have a future; it’s saying that the ones that don’t waste your time will survive because you will pay for them. To be sure, there is news that we want to know and news that we need to know (whether he want to or not). The question is: how many of our papers provide that? We would enjoy getting your response.
Seriously dude… don’t care if they go away.. Let’s not stiffle progress to preserve an old business model. If they can figure it out. fine. if not thats fine too.
The new generation does not need newspapers.. it is an old inefficient system to us. We just don’t care and we don’t get sentimental about them either.
Help a starving business reporter
They moved your markets. Now you can move their bank accounts.
The Society of American Business Editors and Writers, or SABEW, is hosting an event next week at Columbia University’s School of Journalism to help business journalists who have lost their jobs or found themselves in other tough straits because of the biggest story on every business reporter’s beat — the financial crisis. Here is the text of the invitation:
Former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor and ProPublica founder Paul Steiger, and New York Times Business Editor Larry Ingrassia invite you to join them at an event to benefit business journalism and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW).
SABEW needs your support to help displaced business journalists and train business journalists for the digital age and new media landscape. Among SABEW’s programs are a revamped job listing site, a market for freelancers to find work, a mentor program for displaced journalists, teletraining on multimedia and business journalism topics, scholarships to attend conferences and training, and a revamp of our website to provide more robust services to members.
The event is free but donations to the SABEW Fund for the Future are requested as SABEW must raise $50,000 by August to qualify for a matching amount from four foundations.
Many of the business reporters who have recently lost their jobs worked at newspapers and magazines that have been shedding employees right and left because advertising revenue is plunging. Some of that is because of the recession, but much of it is because advertisers see fewer people reading those publications and are moving their ad dollars elsewhere.
Newpapers are obsolete, I surprised they lasted this long. you should pick a theme and commit to it, make yourself a media periodical
discuss music, movies, gaming etc. you will then become more viable with a larger consumer base
condense the nonsensical local stories, no on really cares about the flock of geese that nested on the highway or whatnot. no once cares about beatrice turning 150 years old. (hell beatrice doesnt even know she is 150)
if your content is more appealing, more people will purchase it, and you will get more money for ads, due to a higher consumer base simple math
but as for the news, its been done, daily at 5 and 10 repeated at 1
and can be found 24 hours a day on certain channels and online
your days are numbered paperboy! evolve or get out the way!
New York Times struggles — silently
The New York Times spits out thousands of words a day through its newspapers. If it would only start coughing a few more up about Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who wants a piece of it, if not more. If the Times doesn’t tell its story soon, everybody else will.
So far it has made no comment. That might not be such a slick move. Speculation over the Times’s future has grown during the past few years as its finances worsen because of advertising revenue declines, more than a billion dollars in debt that it has to pay off and the nearly annnual assaults on the company’s management by shareholders and others who think they know how to do the job better.
The latest news frenzy came when Fortune writer Richard Siklos said that Geffen wanted to buy a nearly 20 percent stake owned by one-time dissident shareholder Harbinger Capital Partners, but was rebuffed. Nearly every news outlet got the story (though most of us paid less attention to a report that a Harbinger-nominated director tried to get Google to buy the Times — and failed), while the Financial Times said that Geffen wants to buy the whole company.
That would be next to impossible, as would any friendly or hostile move at taking control, because the Ochs-Sulzberger family under nearly every circumstance doesn’t have to cave. That hasn’t stopped the frenzy, of course, because the Times’s flagging fortunes have led some to conclude that the Sulzbergers will get sick of seeing themselves growing poor and demand an exit of some kind.
Now, two days after the reports of Geffen’s interest surfaced, the speculation is in full force. Why Geffen? What does he want? What will the Times do?
The Times’s answer? It sent out a press release about a feature on nytimes.com that allows you to see the news appear in chronological order as the Times adds items to its site. Cool? Yes. Is it what everybody wants to hear from the Times right now? No.
People want a public utterance of some kind from Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
