My Photo

About

Ken Doctor Bio

Conferences, Presentations & Speaking Engagements

  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

  • Ad Age/Nat Ives: It's Back: 25 MORE Media People You Should Follow on Twitter
    25 media types worth following on Twitter.
  • Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble Globally
    The few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"
  • NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price?
    “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.” He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”
  • Economist: It isn’t just newspapers: much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
    Ken Doctor of Outsell, a research firm, reckons that the Kindle appeals to baby-boomers who would otherwise read a paper magazine or newspaper. The young prefer their iPhones and their aggregators. Indeed, the top four magazines on Kindle, according to Amazon’s website, are the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. Not much of a youth market there.
  • Forbes: San Diego News Shoot-Out
    "The Union-Tribune is cratering. That opens a hole in the market and the opportunity for some unconventional business models."
  • BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices
    “There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”
  • AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is saf
    The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."
  • Guardian: Seattle mourns the last day of its venerable Post Intelligencer
    "There's a lot less reporting happening, on a national scale. For the 1,500 or so daily newspapers, it's just a matter of getting smaller and smaller."
  • Seattle Times: Seattle's oldest newspaper goes to press for the final time
    "They're bringing the full force of their national relationships and content to bear on Seattle. They [Hearst] could sustain this experiment indefinitely. If it makes a million or loses a million, that's nothing to a company like Hearst."
  • AP: Hearst hopes Web-only Seattle P-I will turn profit
    "It [online-only PI] definitely can make money. They have a head start in terms of the brand and (Web) traffic. They have to run like hell to create a new identity."

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

My Work as an Outsell Analyst

Recent Comments

Add me to your TypePad People list
Blog powered by TypePad

July 2009

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31  

Site Meter

BlogBurst

« Don't-Miss Links to Pressing Futures | Main | Bob Hall, Ron Burkle and Patience »

March 25, 2006

10 Questions for Gary Pruitt

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt has his head and hands full buying and sellng papers, as he figures out what it means to be the country's second-biggest newspaper company. A few questions for him as he moves forward (and 10 additional very web-specific ones added):

  1. Was it coincidence that 8 of the 12 KR properties you immediately put on the sales block were Newspaper Guild operations, making your chances of achieving significant cost savings more difficult? 
  1. Were  you surprised that Tony Ridder was surprised that you were going to re-sell 12 of his papers, including his hometown Merc? 
  1. Is the sale of the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times to Dean Singleton’s Media News all-but-a-done-deal, as many suspect?
  1. If you succeed in taking K’s stake in the T(ribune) K(nightrider) G(annett) investments in Career Builder and Classified Ventures, will you push to get some of McClatchy’s local market penetration tricks of the trades adopted? 
  1. Will you push TMG (TGM?) for new collective investments, for instance, in buying an ad matching company, like Quigo or Context Web, so that the news industry’s reliance on Google and Yahoo for paid search/contextual revenue can be reduced? 
  1. Will you make McClatchy more of a player overall in the ventures game, looking for technologies, lead gen companies and other complements to the online businesses? 
  1. Can you figure out a more strategic way to purpose TKG’s 75% stake in Topix to advantage local search and traffic re-circulation on local newspaper sites? 
  1. Can you convince a skeptical Wall Street, which is punishing your purchase daily, that you’ll be getting better-than-expected prices for the Dirty Dozen, defraying the cost of the deal? 

    9 .  Will you give the Yucaipa/Guild bid a wide open shot?

  1. How likely are PCM, Harris and Southeastern to stick with the deal if the McClatchy share price keeps dropping, reducing the “collar-less” purchase price below 62 or 63?

March 25, 2006 in 9 Questions |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c12869e200d8345d7fe369e2

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 10 Questions for Gary Pruitt:

» Lexapro. from Lexapro.
Lexapro. [Read More]

Tracked on June 08, 2009 at 06:27 AM

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Sitting inside one of the orphaned 12, it's questions 3 and 9 that are of particular interest to me.

If McClatchy has any back door deal with Singleton that disadvantages the other bidders, I would hope the shareholders would be up in arms, and that cosmic justice would find Bruce Sherman at the front of the crowd.

Yucaipa's deep pockets and reported patience with its investments seem to make it the best candidate to preserve the quality of journalism in the affected communities. Even setting aside questions of monopoly ownership that arise with Singleton's ownership of the north California papers, his debt service to do the deal would probably spell more cutbacks at the properties than would Yucaipa's ownership.

Posted by: Jack Fischer | March 27, 2006 at 09:23 AM

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by:  | 

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.