More layoffs at McClatchy

McClatchy Watch informs us of this report that McClatchy is reducing its quarterly dividend. Hard to fathom why they would give any dividend at all the way the company is bleeding cash.

McClatchy is also slashing another 10% from its workforce.

We can surely expect that the Heralds will be affected. I guess they offended the Orishas.

Additionally ad revenues were down 17.8% in August compared to August of last year. A lot of people scoffed when it was suggested that newspapers need to sell more ads for less money (e.g. reduce the ad/editorial ratio to about 50/50). With declining circulations I don't see another way for the traditional fishwraps to survive. Show me an advertiser that wants to pay more to reach less people.

McClatchy shares closed up, at $3.40, after trading at a 52-week low of $2.57 during the day.

Pruitt resigns one of his McClatchy positions

The chairman of Herald parent company McClatchy, Gary Pruitt, has announced that he is stepping down as "trustee of four trusts that control about 12.5 million shares of [the company's] Class B stock."

An interesting note in the article is that:

The McClatchy family owns about one-third of the company’s shares, but the Class B stock gives members 80 percent of the voting control, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late Friday.

McClatchy's shares traded in $50 range a couple of years ago and are now trading at about $3.60. The newspaper business is taking it's lumps but McClatchy is taking more than most.

H/T: Bob

End of another terrible week for MNI shares

Anyone who is foolish enough to still own shares of Herald parent company, McClatchy, must be saying T.G.I.F. as the stock closed at $4.61. That's a drop of 5.73% just today. As has been par the course, the stock traded at a new 52-week low of $4.46 before rebounding slightly at the close of trading. I can only cringe when I think about the fact that in April of 2005 this stock was trading for $75.

H/T: Big Bob

MNI Shares continue to circle the drain

Once again shares of Herald parent, McClatchy, dropped during trading. Today the price closed below $5.00 for the first time ending the day at $4.93 after hitting ANOTHER 52-week low of $4.82.

The street continues to be unimpressed with the company's cost cutting moves.

Last week Standard & Poor's reduced MNI's corporate credit rating from BB- to B+ with a 'negative outlook' and:

It also cut its rating on the senior unsecured debt that Sacramento-based McClatchy assumed when it acquired Knight-Ridder Inc. in 2006, from B to B-minus, and kept unchanged its assessment that creditors holding that debt are unlikely to recover more than 10 percent if there is a payment default.

MNI Shares tank again

Shares of Herald parent, McClatchy dropped again during trading on Friday. The stock closed at $5.09 after reaching another 52-week low of $4.85 (the first time the stock has dropped below $5.00) during the day.

Less than two years ago this stock traded in the $40s. A devaluation of nearly 90%.

Interesting

McClatchy's Washington DC bureau has its own web site. And you can access any article they have published on the site, since its inception, for free.

Sense of humor alive and well in Herald Newsroom

An anonymous tipster sent me the following photo and message:

The attached photo is of an altar that is currently sitting in the herald newsroom. The piece of paper attached to the chicken states: "Brought in by a Santeria priest (the real deal from Hialeah) to help save our jobs."

Random Pixels has another photo of the altar.

McClatchy's Raleigh Newspaper preparing for layoffs

Via McClatchy Watch we learn that a Raleigh TV station is reporting imminent layoffs at McClatchy's Raleigh News & Observer:

The News & Observer is preparing to lay off about 10 percent of its newsroom staff and will announce other cuts affecting its news operation, sources inside the N&O tell WRAL.com.

However, a formal announcement may not come until next week. The N&O is part of the McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) newspaper chain, and the group reportedly is planning to announce corporate-wide cutbacks, one newsroom source said. McClatchy also owns The Charlotte Observer.

Herald Watch readers may remember that I posted a tip from a reader about a possible layoff of as many as many as 230 Herald employees at the end of the quarter. At the time a skeptical reader challenged the report:

I find this hard to believe. 11 percent of the workforce?

While the WRAL report only talks about newsroom layoffs it would be fair to say that the layoffs are going to be across the board since the newsroom is charged with actually producing what the newspaper sells and everyone else is in some kind of support role. Needless to say the 10% number is in line with everything we're hearing. And end of the quarter seems right.

How do you say "no thanks" in Hindi?

Posted at Herald.com

Herald will not outsource editorial functions

The McClatchy Co., which announced in December it would experiment with outsourcing some production of The Miami Herald's Broward Neighbors sections to an India firm, has canceled that project.

''We've decided this would not be an appropriate use of this service so it won't be tested, nor will other newsroom and editing design like it,'' wrote Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal in a staff memo Jan. 14. ``The more we looked at the prospects of editing and layout from outside the newsroom, the more it was clear these skills involving news judgment and experience are not likely to work well from afar.

Other outsourcing projects, such as the production of some advertising sections and monitoring of website comments, will continue. The Sacramento-based McClatchy has been testing outsourcing at its other papers, including some advertising production at its flagship Sacramento Bee.

H/T: McClatchy Watch

McClatchy spin

Interesting read about McClatchy, parent company of the Heralds, in the Wall Street Journal today. It gives some details about McClatchy's CEO, Gary Pruitt and provides some history including the recent acquisition of the Heralds and other Knight Ridder newspapers.

The interesting things is how they try to put a happy face on the loss of 2/3 of the share value in the last year. The McClatchy family owns 80% of the voting shares.

Pruitt gets a vote of confidence from the board of directors in the piece and Gannett Blog says that's usually what happens right before one gets fired.

H/T: McClatchy Watch

McClatchy to go private?

Kevin Gregory at McClatchy Watch brings us the news that the McClatchy family may be considering taking the public company private. I guess it's good time for it since the company worth almost 70% less than it was a year ago.

Deja Vu

Posting about Herald parent company McClatchy's free-falling share price is getting a little repetitive but somebody has to report it.

MNI shares closed at 13.76 today.

On a related note, the Heralds' sister paper The Kansas City Star is offering packages to 4% of its employees to leave, in a cost cutting measure.

Herald circs decline...again

Editor & Publisher is reporting that the combined circulation for the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald has dropped by 8.4% (weekdays) and 12.3% (Sundays) since the last reporting period.

Over the last couple of years, the Heralds have been among the leaders in vanishing newspaper circulations.

Not the news that McClatcy wants to hear given their plunging share price which is hovering at a 52-week low.

It's hard to imagine a worse situation for the Herald.

MNI Shares Tumble

This story is getting kind of repetitive but McClatchy shares hit another 52-week low yesterday.

The interesting thing is that the company "did not make a formal announcement Tuesday that would have prompted the slide. The company will release its third-quarter earnings Oct. 16."

I'm guessing that this sudden downward move is in anticipation of more bad news on the revenue and circulation front.

Ouch.

MNI shares continue to tank

After a disastrous day on the NYSE yesterday, McClatchy stock continued its nosedive today closing at another 52-week low of 19.67. Can the layoffs, sell-offs and closures be far behind? Ouch.

McClatchy's quarterly earnings report will be made via conference call on October 16 at 9:00 Eastern. To gain access to the call, dial 1-877-278-1205 at least ten minutes prior to the scheduled start of the call. The call conference ID is 18225165.

Herald Watch will be...

listening.

McClatchy stock takes a dive

Shares for McClatchy, the parent company of the Heralds fell to a 52-week low of $22.61 today. No word on what caused today's 3.2% drop. Surely recent ad revenue numbers didn't help.

McClatchy surprise, selling Star Trib

In a surprising move McClatchy, the parent company of MHMC has sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which happens to be the paper that TMH's new executive editor, Anders Gyllenhaal, came from. The sale price of the paper ($530 million) is actually about half of what McClatchy paid (1.2 billion) for it in 1998. That's a lot of red ink, ouch.

"Gyllenhaal said Tuesday he was asked to take the Miami job before he learned that a Star Tribune sale was pending."

Perhaps he didn't know, but McClatchy knew. I guess Gyllenhaal should feel honored that McClatchy wanted to keep him around, even as they planned to scrap the underperforming paper he was at.

The new owner of the Star Tibune is a private investment group, Avista Capital Partners.

Hat tip to: Enrique

Wakefield: Fiedler had no vision he could articulate

Rebecca Wakefield has written a column for the Sun Post about outgoing TMH executive editor Tom Fiedler. Some excerpts:

Widely considered a nice guy (I’ve always thought he sounded a bit like the host of a children’s show), Fiedler was, in his 33 years at the Herald, good at a number of things. He was a great reporter, a good political editor, a decent editorial page editor and, ultimately, so-so as executive editor.

There was a feeling in 2001 and now five years later, that Fiedler was a caretaker, the guy the bigwigs at corporate could rely on to keep the estate in good condition while they managed its lucrative decline.

“I try to resist thinking that the golden age of journalism is behind us,” Fiedler told me this week. “I think it’s simply that things changed. Clearly what drove the change was the readership, when our circulation began to dip and readers began to indicate they were no longer interested in the kind of journalism we all treasure.”

Fiedler points to the death of the beloved Tropic magazine, a weekly Herald supplement that allowed for in-depth exploration of the issues and general weirdness of South Florida. “It didn’t die for no reason,” he says. “It died because it lacked support, a lack of advertising and mass readership. The same was true in general of the coverage we valued in the 1980s.”

Similarly, the Herald closed most of its bureaus all over the state because Miami advertisers didn’t much care about readers elsewhere. “As the economic imperatives came to fruition, we had to start shrinking our reach, pull in our net,” he says. “I wish it were different, but wishing doesn’t make it different.”

“I’ve tried to remind people at the heart of all this, quality journalism matters and that’s what we’re all about. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded on that. But I do think the Miami Herald newsroom is still pound for pound the best newsroom in the country. It makes Miami a better place than it would be.

Whomever or whatever we hate, we can find it in the paper, either in what is written, or what is not.

That is one reason why the daily newspaper is absolutely vital to Miami. As imperfect as it is, as rudderless, bogged-down and lacking in stones as its management has often seemed, we need the Miami Herald.

The problem with Fiedler, in my opinion, is that his essentially good qualities as a person and a reporter didn’t translate well to management. He’s a stand-up, almost painfully earnest guy; a team player, a believer in the institution even when the walls are crumbling. But he didn’t have a vision you could articulate in any specific, actionable way.

Fiedler became a symbol of, and an apologist for, the disconnects between the Herald and the communities it serves, the business and editorial missions.

“Anders [The incoming Herald Executive Editor] has credibility and respect in the Herald newsroom,” Fiedler says. “And he has credibility with McClatchy. So he’s in a better position than I would have been.”

I don't know Fiedler personally but what Wakefield says makes sense. I mean several observers including former Herald columnist Jim Defede have characterized Fiedler as a "company man" and Fiedler's own remark about incoming editor Anders Gyllenhaal having more credibility with McClatchy tells us his company was Knight Ridder.

The thing that strikes me most about the piece is that Fiedler seems to blame everyone else for the Herald's decline but the Herald itself. The readers don't appreciate the "type of journalism we all treasure" and the "advertisers didn't care". As I've mentioned about Fiedler before, I think there's a lack of introspection in him that would be necessary to lead a newspaper through this period of time where the future role of traditional fishwraps is highly uncertain. You can't just keep trying to do the same old things and lament the fact that people don't want or need the same old things. I know that there has to be tension between what sells and what's journalistically proper, but like the proverbial tree falling in the solitary woods there is a question of whether a newspaper without readers makes a sound.

Regardless of who made the decision, Fiedler's moving on is probably best for the paper's new owners, the paper itself, the readers and the community.