In Real Estate Sell-Off, Newspaper Symbols Slip Away

The Symbols Are Slinking Away: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the sale of the Santa Cruz Sentinel building in downtown Santa Cruz, one of that city's most historic buildings. Now we see that the real estate housing the un-bought out and the un-laid off is going to be auctioned off around the country. (In Philadelphia, staff reduction means that only 40% of the building is now inhabited by newspaper staff.)

(Addendum: Jay Devine, representing the Philly newspapers, has added a clarification on the real estate history there, in a comment at end of this post.)

Here in this Wall Street Journal story, we see moving and potential moving signs in Philly, Chicago, L.A., Boston and Minneapolis as well, though the a deal involving the Strib looks like it just fell through.

You can't fault new Philly owner Brian Tierney's reasoning:

"We're in the news business," he says. "You have to make choices in life."....Mr. Tierney holds out hope that the paper may be able to stay on the same property, convincing a buyer to develop an office building on adjoining land which it would then lease back. "We want to make sure our building is iconic, because we're doing the people's work," he says. "But we want people to look at it and say, 'There's the future.'"

But you can't make light of architecture dean Michael Lykoudis' assessment either:

"These are buildings that were designed to be visible and vibrant. Their style reflects their mission: to inform the citizenry about the issues of the day."

No one wants it this way. But it's a war out there, and this is part of the collateral damage.

Comments

[Jay Devine]

I work with Brian Tierney and Philadelphia Media Holdings and wanted to correct some of the facts referred to in the Wall Street Journal story and your blog post yesterday. The primary disconnect is the fact that in 1994 Knight Ridder bought 46 acres in Philadelphia's suburbs and moved 60% of thw workforce out of the downtown building and never had a plan to fill up this vacted space. The reason that the building is up for sale is not due to any recent layoffs which now net out at about 32 people company-wide but the inherited bad real estate decisions of the prior management. Smart managers look for ways to leverage under-utilized assets so that they can reinvest and expand in the strategic parts of their business. That is why circulation and web traffic are all up at The Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com. This is what this decision is all about.