Two very good and sobering posts about the declining value of newspaper stocks by Alan Mutter: This one analyzes the stocks of publishing companies:
In a dramatic repudiation of newspapers by investors, the shares of publicly held publishing stocks in the last two years lost nearly $13.5 billion in value, or 20.5% of their market capitalization.
To put this in perspective, the vaporized value is greater than the enterprise value of the Tribune Co. or the combined value of the McClatchy, New York Times and Media General publishing companies.
The vertiginous drop came at the same time the Dow Jones industrial average soared to an all-time high and other market indicators gained by healthy double-digit percentages.
And this one points out that the sale of Knight Ridder had the quite-unintended consequence of losing yet more value:
n the six months since KRI was sold, the shares of the acquiring company, McClatchy Newspapers, have deteriorated so badly that the KRI shares swapped for MNI stock have lost nearly 7.6% of their value.
