Andrew Ross Sorkin broke the news in The New York Times.
Landmark is considering selling all its media properties, including The Virginian-Pilot and The Weather Channel.
A family-owned company that could be sold for more than $5 billion, Landmark Communications is one of the most successful multimedia groups in the United States.
The BIG question here is not how much money they are going to get or who is going to be the buyer …
The BIG question is WHY they are exiting this business.
This is not a Bancroft kind of family.
But the message is dramatic.
They don’t believe in the future of traditional media.
And they are not going to invest in new media.
Landmark has been very slow to enter the online media world and this announcement is the proof that they don’t want to take any risk.
Another newspaper dynasty refuses to battle.
Not good news for the newspaper industry in this country.
Landmark is a private company, but as Alan Mutter said on Tuesday:
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.
…
Wall Street’s vigorous repudiation of newspaper stocks reflects a deep, and arguably growing, concern that publishers don’t know how to arrest three years of mounting declines in audience, sales and profitability. Even the industry’s promised efforts to improve new media sales are failing to keep pace with online competitors, as discussed here and here.
The accelerated erosion of newspaper shares since the collapse of the easy-credit markets in 2007 appears to reflect waning hopes on the part of investors that a fresh crop of daring souls like Rupert Murdoch or Sam Zell will arrive to bid up the stocks of the sagging public companies so they can take them private and try to fix them.
With neither improved business prospects nor white knights likely to be on the horizon, you can’t blame newspaper executives for cringing as they turn a new page on the calendar. Unless they come up with a lot of creative and profitable ideas in a hurry, many of them may not be around to ring in 2009.
Well said, Alan!