Can we really be living in the last days of newspapers? Is the internet really going to do it for us?
The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition Thursday night.
The filing had been anticipated for several months. It follows missed payments to the paper’s lenders, and comes less than two years after a private equity group, Avista Capital Partners, purchased the paper for $530 million.
In its filing, the newspaper listed assets of $493.2 million and liabilities of $661.1 million. The company said it hopes to use bankruptcy to restructure its debt and lower its labor costs.
Like most newspapers, the Star Tribune has experienced a sharp decline in print advertising. Its earnings before interest, taxes and debt payments was about $26 million in 2008, down from about $59 million in 2007 and about $115 million in 2004.
1. Wow. That's some drop.
2. Earnings was?
How sad. I sure hope they pull out of this. They and all the other newspapers that are struggling so hard to survive.
2 comments:
As a past employee of the "Strife and Tribulation", perhaps it is better that they just go away. I know they are supposed to be a "liberal leaning" newspaper, but they have decimated their unions, turned their paper carriers into "contract labor",
etc.
We had a human resources meeting once. They told us to prepare to work longer hours for less pay so we could compete with third world countries.
What this had to do with the newspaper business, I have no clue.
Perhaps its best they just disappear into the sunset
Much as we'd like to think so, the epidemic of death among newspapers and other print publications has little to do with their quality, their political leanings or their corporate citizenship. It has do do with the ability of modern information technology to give people the notion that publishing enterprises that cost millions of dollars to maintain should be available to them for free, nothing, nada, zilch. I, for one, am sad to the Trib fallen to this state. It is another signal of the end of an era. --Inkstained Wretch
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