Canada's largest newspaper chain is up for sale

[gordo]

This has just hit the internets - not sure if it's on Craig's List yet:

For sale: Canwest Limited Partnership, which holds The National Post, 10 major city dailies — Victoria Times Colonist, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver's The Province, Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal's The Gazette — as well as 26 community newspapers, and associated online and mobile properties.

gordon p

[rbailleu]

is that just the assets or the whole thing as a going concern.

[JLRobertson]

The banks that are the creditors are forcing auctions of the properties ... the Aspers (owners) have played too long and deep in the growth-by-debt game, and missed several opportunities to pay down that debt, even nominally, over the past couple of years.
For our American friends, it's a prime example of the second generation not having the talents of the first ...

[gordo]

In Sunday's edition of the Vancouver Province newspaper there was a message by Kevin D. Bent, President & Publisher to its customers about the bankruptcy issue. The headline was: "A message to our customers: It's business as usual"

Kinda says it all doesn't it?

gordon p

[rbailleu]

yes it happens all the time. kids don't want to run the family business like dad. sometimes thats a good thing sometimes not so good.

speaking of debt we have a local paper here owned by a company called gatehouse media. they own lots of small papers. there stock dropped to 3 cents/ share in late 2008. you could by the whole company for like $15 mil. but they have a debt of $1.2 billion.

[JLRobertson]

Of course, a lot of these properties were immensely profitable at one time ... Thomson newspapers had a de facto policy of shedding papers that had sunk to 30 per cent profit levels.

[rbailleu]

of course if newspapers would figure out that they could charge a little more for their commercial presswork they might figure out how to keep the presses running.

[JLRobertson]

Every paper I've worked for ran that iron for more than just the newspaper itself, there was always commercial work going out the door. Sometimes the editorial schedule would collide with the commerical schedule ... the beauty part was that the advertising department always got the blame!

[HachiZenki]

yes it happens all the time. kids don't want to run the family business like dad. sometimes thats a good thing sometimes not so good.

speaking of debt we have a local paper here owned by a company called gatehouse media. they own lots of small papers. there stock dropped to 3 cents/ share in late 2008. you could by the whole company for like $15 mil. but they have a debt of $1.2 billion.

That's just the problem with the newspaper industry as a whole during this whole downturn. They all drank the kool aid and levered up to either buy other papers or invest heavily in new equipment thinking the good times would just roll on. A good example of that happened in my state. There were 2 major dailies servicing Honolulu, The Star Bulletin (privately held) and The Honolulu Advertiser (owned by Gannett). For a while the Advertiser was killing the Star Bulletin taking share but then Gannett decided to lever up and spend $82 million on a new plant full of Man Roland GeoMans to take advantage of the real estate boom (MEDIAN home price in Honolulu: $500,000+) and to try and print USA Today. Then 2 years later came the economic collapse. Just last week it was announced that the Advertiser would be sold to the Star Bulletin and they in turn were going to lay off a lot of their staff. This comming on top of laying off staff last year.