Hey Mort, Chuck, Rupe! Welcome to Hellville, Long Island!
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Off the Record
On Jan. 15, Sam Zell dropped by the bleak house that is the Melville, N.Y., headquarters of Newsday, Long Island’s newspaper.
It was to be a pep talk: The last decade, characterized by its nearly annual tradition of soul-wrenching job cuts, was over. “We’ve got to get off our ass,” he said to the assemblage of reporters and salesmen; it went over well, less like a scolding than a slap on the butt from Coach.
Two months later, a somber group showed up at the Newsday auditorium for cannoli, pecan pie and coffee to say goodbye to the 36 newsroom buyouts Tribune had exacted from the paper, including three national reporters, several business reporters, its features editor, its movie editor and two critics. (Some reporters were taken off other desks and transferred to the Long Island desk.)
There was a speech, but no toasts, no booze, and very little of that Zell zetz you hear so much about. With recent sales, and further attrition, younger reporters in the newsroom have begun to adopt a pet nickname for the newspaper’s Melville headquarters: Hellville.
Mr. Zell recently said that the Tribune Company—which owns Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune—was doing so poorly that “we may have to reevaluate a lot of our decisions,” which included selling some Tribune properties.
Newsday was put on the block, and the three usual suspects have shown up: the owners of the region’s two other tabloids, Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, and the perennial also-ran of Long Island media efforts, Charles Dolan. (Last time they sold Newsday, he was mad nobody told him.)
The price quoted for the paper keeps changing, but it’s pretty fair to call it a fire sale.
So what does Sam Zell know that these New York media veterans don’t?
For one thing, Sam Zell was never cut out to be a player in a single regional media market. What can the Tribune Company do with a Melville bureau? And is it worth it to sustain one so that their Pentagon coverage can reach Long Islanders?
But for Messrs. Murdoch, Zuckerman and Dolan, Newsday instantly gains them the wealthy, suburban readership their other properties—the New York Post and New York Daily News—haven’t quite been able to crack.
Since the Long Island Press folded in 1977, Newsday has gone without any daily competition in covering the island; the paper tells advertisers it reaches 71 percent of all Long Island residents, themselves a significantly more acquisitive lot than most random samples you could take somewhere else.
“If you asked me five years ago, I would have said it would fetch $1 billion,” said John Morton, a newspaper analyst. “Now it’ll get somewhere closer to $600 million.”
But even at that, the paper is still making money, something Mr. Murdoch can’t say for the Post. Last year, Newsday had an operating revenue of $498 million, according to an S.E.C. filing, and an overall cash flow of $88 million, according to an internal memo.
“Newsday is a great property,” said Jason Klein, the president of the Newspaper National Network, a company that sells ads to newspapers. “It’s one of the largest circulation papers that penetrate deeply into an affluent and suburban area.”
And it is rarer still that its entire circulation—which ranked 12th nationally in 2007—is almost entirely suburban (read: deep wallets).
But that’s also precisely the reason that Newsday doesn’t serve much of a purpose for Mr. Zell.
“If he’s going to sell a paper, I figured it would be this one,” said Edward Atorino, a newspaper analyst at the Benchmark Company. “It’s a little too local, especially compared to the Chicago Tribune or the L.A. Times. It doesn’t have the national presence that those papers do—they are national brands.”
In his two-month tour of newsrooms, Mr. Zell has hinted that he’s looking for more consolidation among his news outfits—for his papers to work almost as a wire service for another.
In a late February meeting in the Tribune’s Washington bureau, his comments seemed to indicate that he was interested in creating something like a mini Knight Ridder. He reportedly complained about the papers’ overlaps (competing “fiefdoms” he said); why, then, one could imagine him thinking, would the L.A. Times have a Pentagon reporter when the Chicago Tribune already had one? Ideally, there would be centralized news coming out of the bureau used for various papers, and bodies could be saved. Calling the bureau “bloated,” he reportedly pointed to the L.A. Times Washington bureau chief, Doyle McManus, and said, “Your revenue is down 20 percent. How many of the 47 [newsroom staffers] did you get rid of?”
With that logic, a religiously local paper like Newsday would serve no purpose. Next Page >
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I don't understand -- are you implying there is a Newsday?
Ahem. Captioned as Charles Dolan ... it's actually one of his sons, the most notorious one, James L.
Now I am going to say something no one else has said. The newspapers of this country were funded by ads from Jewish-owned Department Stores in the major cities. These Department Stores, such as Gimbels, Saks' 34th Street, B. Altmans (althought controlled by a Roman Catholic family's oversight of a Trust), Stern Bros.,and the Christian ones like Wanamakers, Strawbridge and Clothier, De Pinna's have been destroyed by the large, discount chains, mainly Walmart that the media all adored. Now that Walmart and others don't need ads in the print media, the papers are going nowhere. Moreover the specialty stores which sell luxury goods don't ad because those of us with high incomes aren't going to spend our money at stores that advertise in the papers, who have increasingly become anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and supportive of every wacko group from drag queens to Arab Terrorists. New York Newsday's Manhattan editor was an anti-Semitic, anti-White rage. I have no sympathy for its reporters being unemployed. They brought it on themselves. The only thing I wish to my next birthday is Wolf Blitzer and his program with its opening on CNN International of an Arab Terrorist defending bombing civilians in Israel also goes under and get goes to the unemployment line. MAYBE IF THE MEDIA WEREN'T SO LEFT WING AND ANTI-SEMITIC IT WOULDN'T BE IN SUCH A STATE? Chickens coming home to roost.
Just could be!
Is John Morton looking for a finder's fee?
He told the Times that Newsday would fetch $350-400 million. Now he's upped the price a few days later to $600 million.
Pretty soon, he'll be back up to the $$1 billion he said it was worth a couple of years ago.
By the way, Murdoch paid all of $30 million for the Post back in 1976.
The photo on the far left is of Jim Dolan, not Charles Dolan.
Time for a medication adjustment, Count. Most people who work for newspapers do so with the intention of exposing crap, or artfully conveying the uplifting, and sometimes getting recognized for it. You're wrong about anti-semitism in the newsroom. Papers like Newsday do more to expose and denounce it than any other outlets.
The real tragedy for people who've devoted careers, risked reputations, or even lives, for these downsizing newspapers is that the Corporation has no ability or desire to value their very human motivations and accomplishments--there's no space for either on the balance sheet. Every stunned reporter or editor out the door is a score only for the bottom line. Newsday's travails are your own, dear reader.
First, Newsday didn't make a full-fledged effort at a New York Newsday edition until the early 90s. Second the New York City edition made money within a year or so. It's just that the Corporate bean counters didn't think it made ENOUGH money, so they shuttered the best paper the city had in years.
All the mainstream media ever talks about is that revenues are down at newspapers (true). What they don't mention is that many of them are still making profits. The LA Times had a profit margin of about 15 percent when Tribune started cutting jobs. That's a better return than most of the Fortune 500 companies. The solution is to have local, non-corporate ownership of big city dailies.
The story and the lamentable comments ignore the basics: from its inception on Sept. 3, 1940, Newsday has been one of the great stories of success in American journalism. Maybe the greatest.
Under the leadership of its founder, Alicia Patterson, and early editors such as Alan Hathway, Bill McIlwain and Al Marlens --- later Tony Insolia, Tony Marro, Howie Schneider and Les Payne --- the paper was a study, first, in tough reporting and snappy writing.
Later it seemed to fancy itself a little New York Times, becoming more serious and somewhat less amusing. That's what sobriety will do for you. Yet it did depth pretty well in the mid-years, and did it with distinction later on. Just count its Pulitzers.
It was, and remains, one of the nation's best papers. At times it was THE best in the New York region. To forget that is a severe disservice to Newsday and its astounding newsroom down the decades.
Show it the respect it deserves, please.
Hey you dufus John Koblin -- you are just about the laziest excuse for a reporter I have encountered in quite awhile! Keep up the good work! Now let's go over your basic work ethic -- one plus one equals..... TWENTY-TWO!