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Jan

7

Veteran media exec says, “23B zapped in news stock value”


Hattip to this post at PJNet.org. This graph by Alan D. Mutter is stark:

Mutter reports, as to the information represented in that graph,

The market value of the American newspaper publishers entering 2008 as independent, publicly traded companies has fallen by $23 billion, or 42%, since the end 2004, the year before the wheels started coming off the industry.

Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of newspaper stocks came in 2007, when the shares lost a collective $11 billion, or 26%, of their value. Thus, newspapers lost nearly as much value last year as they did in the two prior years put together.

The vaporized value of newspaper shares in 2007 exceeded the combined $10 billion market caps of Gannett and McClatchy, the nation’s two largest publicly held publishers by circulation. And the $23 billion drop in shareholder value since yearend 2004 equals the current total value of all the common stock of Belo, Gannett, Lee Enterprises, Media General, McClatchy, the New York Times Co. and the Washington Post Co.

That’s crazy as Saturday Night Live’s Brian Fellows would say. But true.

The only positive performers:

One winner was the Washington Post Co., whose shares gained 4% in value in the last three years, thanks to aggressive diversification out of the newspaper business and into such lucrative endeavors as its Kaplan test-prep schools.

But the big winner, by far, was Dow Jones, which climbed 65% in value as the result of the sumptuous price News Corp. paid to buy it from the dysfunctional Bancroft clan.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:31 pm January 7th, 2008 in Media 

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