Never Trust Anyone Under Thirty.

Gannett stock's amazing plunge continued yesterday as the stock closed below $30 a share for the first time in over a decade.  The stock has dropped 50% in the last year and 25% year to date.  This is a much sharper drop than the market itself, but more importantly, it's a much sharper drop than other major newspaper stocks.  The hapless New York Times, for example, is actually up year to date. 

At this rate someone is surely going to swoop in to take it over, slash costs (code talk for "fire everyone") and sell the pieces.  Hmm, that's a really good idea...maybe after I get out of finals....

If you are looking for really in depth unofficial Gannett coverage, check out the Gannett Blog.

(Since we are approaching the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Democratic Convention, I hope you appreciated my little homage to Jerry Rubin.)

Comments

[BobH]

I think I'm going to apply to be certified as a fortune-teller.

A couple months ago, I predicted that one way out for newspapers (and Gannett specifically) was to combine operations regionally. It appears Gannett is doing that in Iowa -- the blog says the Iowa City paper will now be printed in Des Moines, allowing a bunch of layoffs in the Iowa City pressroom.

Iowa City is 114 miles from Des Moines. How far is Tucson from Phoenix?

I'll repeat/update my prediction: Gannett buys the Star, folds the Citizen (or renames it the Star-Citizen), and combines operations with Phoenix. First will be printing, but eventually much of the reporting will be combined as well.

[Poison]

If daily newspapers didn't still exist, I might have trouble convincing my kids that they ever existed in my lifetime. I'd probably describe it something like this: A pile of paper was delivered to your door every morning with lots of neat little tidbits of information--some of them true, some of them false, and all of them old by the time you read them. And all of it was spoon fed to us by these highly intelligent and compassionate gatekeepers of information called journalists. How quaint!

The print journalist is often compared to other relics of the past, such as the milkman, but to me it's even worse than that. Imagine if the milkman enjoyed hanging out in the dairy section of the grocery store just so he could taunt the customers, screaming insults and obscenities and telling them they aren't qualified to buy their own milk. Also imagine that the milk he was selling was laced with poison.