You made $37.4 million more than McClatchy

The headlines in February showed a feisty newspaper industry that was winning its war with the president and the 62 million patriotic Americans who elected him.

From the Financial Times: "Newspapers welcome more digital subscribers in time of Fake News."

Spunky!

From Poynter: "Gannett and McClatchy made digital gains at the end of 2016."

Spunky!

From that Financial Times report:

The press has been both punching bag and beneficiary in the age of Trump: the NYT alone added a record 267,000 subscribers in the fourth quarter, most of them after Mr Trump was elected. Mr Thompson used the gains to hit back at the president’s claims that the newspaper is “failing” and is a purveyor of “fake news”. Following Mr Trump’s tweet that NYT subscribers were “dwindling”, he retorted in a conference call on the company’s financial results earlier this month: “Well, not so much, Mr President.”

As the newspaper industry battles with Mr Trump, it also faces challenges to its twin pillars of advertising and circulation revenues. Publishers must weather the print drop-off, compete in a digital market dominated by Facebook and Google, and turn recent readership bumps into sustainable growth in circulation revenue.

Spunky!

From that Poynter report:

Both Gannett and McClatchy showed healthy growth in digital advertising. Subcategories like mobile and video are way up (though on a small dollar base). And rates are leveling or rising as the companies deliver more products and better targeting.

Progress on paid digital subscriptions is painstaking. Gannett now has 182,000 through USA Today and its network of 109 local properties. That's a 70 percent gain from a year ago. McClatchy has 82,000.

Ah spunky.

Lou Grant: You know what, you've got spunk!
Mary Richards: Well, yes...
Lou Grant: I hate spunk! 

Of course he does. Spunky doesn't pay the bills.

The New York Times’s buyout of 100 employees belies its insistence that it’s not a failing enterprise.

The dead tree industry is dying.

And the jump to online is at least a decade too late.

From Poynter now:

McClatchy quarterly results and forecast show more stormy weather ahead for newspaper organizations

As expected, McClatchy today reported some encouraging gains in several of its digital businesses but a big second quarter loss – $37.4 million on revenues of $225 million.

The report also included an ominous forecast with implications for the rest of the industry – deep print advertising losses are not expected to ease in the second half of this year.

For McClatchy in the quarter, print advertising was off 15.6 percent compared the same period in 2016. That was helped by including results of a stable direct marketing business, which constitutes nearly a third of the total.

Major print categories were down by a bigger percentage – retail (-22 percent), national (-31 percent) and classified (-14.5 percent). McClatchy is the first of the publicly traded news companies to report, so I would look for more of the same as others deliver their quarterly results in coming weeks.

The big loss was attributable to a non-cash "impairment charge" of $46 million, marking down McClatchy's stake in the industry's digital job site CareerBuilder. It also incurred $20 million in interest expense on its debt for the quarter.

To put that in perspective, I turn to a little book I read a while ago.

From "The Art of the Comeback" by Donald J. Trump:

One day, while walking down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with Marla, I pointed across the street to a man holding a cup and with a Seeing Eye dog. I asked, "Do you know who that is?"

Marla said to me: "Yes, Donald. He's a beggar. Isn't it too bad? He looks so sad!"

I said, "You're right. He's a beggar, but he's worth about $900 million more than me." She looked at me and said, "What do you mean, Donald? How could he possibly be worth $900 million more than you?"

I said, "Let's assume he's worth nothing (only from the standpoint of dollars) -- I'm worth minus $900 million."

Good news, readers. You made $37 million more than McClatchy did this spring.

Hahaha.

Just don't try to spend it.

The difference is, Trump came back from that disaster in 1995. Newspapers won't.

The crash-and-burn is expensive as newspapers pour money into an Internet they still don't understand.

The smart money got out two decades ago after Craigslist ate up their classified ads. Thomson sold off 100 or so daily newspapers.

Dumb money bought them and now grapples with its advertisers going online to advertise, or going out of business. How many Sears stores will be around next year? 

Just as CNN protests that it is not Fake News, newspapers insist they have a future.

But CNN is Fake News -- and newspapers have no future, absent a jolly billionaire (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Carlos Slim, for example) who is willing to underwrite the losses.

This won't last.

Caution: Readers occasionally may laugh out loud at the media as they read this account of Trump's election.

It is available on Kindle, and in paperback.

Caution: Readers occasionally may laugh out loud at the media as they read this account of Trump's nomination.

It is available on Kindle, and in paperback.

Autographed copies of both books are available by writing me at DonSurber@GMail.com

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