Oh, shit.
The Times Leader's hope of being the player to be named later in a giant newspaper deal involving the heavies in St. Paul and San Jose just went out the window.
Hearst, MediaNews, Gannett and the Stephens all worked out a deal that gets the Pioneer Press in St. Paul and the Mercury News in San Jose off the market, along with two other California newsapers. One in three reporters west of the Mississippi will be working for a new publisher by the time the dust settles.
The TL is now knocking around with a motley crew that includes the likes of Aberdeen, S.D. and Fort Wayne, Ind. It's telling that the last two words in the AP's thousand-word opus were these: "Wilkes-Barre, Pa."
The best thing that could happen is that the TL is packaged with the Philly papers and sold to someone who is willing to pay more than the Lynetts.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
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3 comments:
Did anyone have a realistic expectation that a company would invest money in a two newspaper market?
There was a slim chance if the TL was part of a big package deal.
Now that a few of the plums are off the market, it doesn't look good in WB. It makes me very very sad.
The principle reason two papers exist today -- this week -- in WB is simple. There's enough advertising around to support both. But probably not enough to satisfy greedy stockholders in any of the madhat media corporations. Besides, as another entry on this blog notes, the CV's total employment is down, 75 fewer bodies than its "union" workforce alone once numbered.
Is there enough advertising around to support both? If there were, I suspect the CV would not have become part of the Lynett empire; there would be no Nexstar siamese twins; the Scrantonian/Tribune would exist. It might just be that WB/Scr somehow retained more reporting jobs than the economy justifies.
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