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

March 2010

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

« How Fake is the Fake Par Ridder Blog? | Main | "Dumbo": Sequel to "Sicko"? »

July 27, 2007

Dow Jones: Vig for the Family, The Cohasset Swirl and Rupert's Grocery Problem

So it's Friday, and we'd hope that reporters could take the weekend off, as the Bancroft whirl promises to move into week 2.

With the Denver wing of the family -- don't you start to feel like we're learning a bit too much about this family? -- now saying yes, but more, more, demanding that Rupert pay an extra premium for Class A Bancroft shares, we're left to wonder what the impact will mean.

Sure Murdoch's said $60 is his price, but why not a few tens of millions more?

What he has had working in his favor is simplicity: $60 a share, no Brad Greenspan-like loan/partial buyback/recapitalization moves or Ron Burkle ESOP maneuvers (and we know, courtesy of Tribune and Sam Zell how long that process can take). No, just $60 a share. So as part of the family wants to clearly say "no" and another wants to buy fifth homes, that could make it just a little more complicated. Still Wall Street may think the push for a little more will actually help get the deal done, as DJ stock went back up today. (See Eric Savitz report on the DJ stock turnaround today and comments here.)

If you do really like the family angle on the Dow Jones/Bancroft story, do not miss the 4000-word letter to fellow family members from Crawford Hill (don't these people have any first names?), who's in favor of selling. He does much recounting of family history, leading him to his conclusion. Sample excerpt:

So, I knew Gay well. What most of you do not know however is that the very same Jessie B. Cox that is mentioned at every turn as "family matriarch" and to whom many of us owe "the legacy" forced her incredibly talented husband, William C. Cox, top student at Milton and Harvard luminary, to retire prematurely from Dow Jones at age 40 so he could be full time in the social swirl of Cohasset. He was a star at the company! My firstborn child -- Hadley -- has that "C." in her name -- Coburn -- to honor the talented and caring Bill Cox, Gramps to his grandchildren.

Meanwhile, forgetting for a moment potential change in editorial practices upon sale, consider News Corp's business practices for a moment.

Fortune contributes a new point of view. Entitled "News Corp's Trouble in Aisle Three" (magazine department: "Litigation"), writer Jennifer Reingold reports that News America Marketing is the subject of four lawsuits. The company -- which Reingold points out makes triple the operating profit of Dow Jones -- is in the grocery ad and direct marketing business. Newspaper coupons and inserts and those lovely machines that push ads to you (or take out your rib) as you stroll down the aisles. The story details the suits over illegal competition, forced bundling, anti-trust, etc. The kicker was especially instructive: News America Marketing CEO Paul Carlucci, who sits on News Corp's executive committee, was appointed publisher of the New York Post in 2005.

I'm sure that the Wall Street Journal would be subject to no influence in covering these suits. Aren't you?

July 27, 2007 in Daily Newspaper Companies, News and Democracy, News Corp/Dow Jones |

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c12869e200e39330ee428834

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Dow Jones: Vig for the Family, The Cohasset Swirl and Rupert's Grocery Problem:

Comments

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

The comments to this entry are closed.