Landmark Sale hits local airwaves, Hearsay talk show

Some notes from the show with video clips to follow:

Virginian-Pilot Business Editor, Bill Choyke, joined Cathy Lewis via phone this week on WHRV’s Hearsay. Per Mr. Choyke, the NY Times broke the story the night before the Landmark staff was informed. Staff still doesn’t know the “why” of the sale. But, the “why now” is fairly obvious. Now is the best time to sell, especially for the Weather Channel, and newspapers will doubtfully “fetch” a good price in the future. And, looking ahead even farther, if the Dems take over the White House, there may be some offensive tax changes.

Lauren Rich Fine, Practitioner in Residence at Kent State University’s College of Communication and Information, joined the conversation. Her background is in equity research of newspapers. Her take on “why now?”: dramatic changes in the industry such as internet and broadband use, the speed news travels, the definition of news today, and the many different ways news is accessed. Classified, real estate and auto, is the most profitable revenue stream for newspapers, which is in direct, full-frontal assault, competition with the web.

In terms of profit-generation for Landmark, Weather Channel and its entities comes in first; Dominion Enterprises is second. Local headquarters, local synergy, local connections will be sorely missed.

What about one paper that serves the entire Hampton Roads region? A marriage of the Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press just doesn’t make sense from a circulation perspective. From an operations angle, merging production and distribution for cost savings may be an option.

Family ownership usually means not looking at profit margins as seriously as a larger corporate owner might. And, such an owner may do better, for instance, in investing in new technologies such as ancillary online businesses. Monetizing the online revenue stream has been a challenge for traditional print media.

Newspapers aren’t going away. (TV and radio depends on newspapers for content!) But the format will certainly change.

One caller, with a youthful voice, said he hadn’t read (or bought) a newspaper in ages. All of his news content comes from online. However, the same resources are needed to create online content as for the print version.

What about jobs? The stats: The Pilot serves 5 cities on the Southside of HR. Employment is approximately 232 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents). Circulation is at 186,500. Industry standard calculation is 1 FTE per 1,000 circulation (which equates to some possible over-staffing if you follow these standards).

Potential buyers? Media General (which owns the Richmond Times-Dispatch) or perhaps a local buyer?

And, the Hampton Roads Chapter of the American Marketing Association (HRAMA) received kudos for our upcoming program with Maurice Jones, VP/GM of the Pilot, on Thursday, January 10th.

Listen to the podcast here in four short parts: