newsosaur reporting: In a year when the stock market flailed mightily to end up almost
exactly where it started, the shares of the publicly traded newspaper
companies plummeted an average of 27% in 2011.
Of the 11 publicly
held newspaper companies, the stock of only one – the broadly
diversified News Corp. – gained ground in the last 12 months. The stock
of the publishing-cum-broadcasting company rose 10.7% in 2011 despite
the phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the closing of the News of
the World and led to questions about Rupert Murdoch's stewardship of the business and the arrests of a more than a dozen former editors and reporters.
The
shares of all the rest of the newspaper publishers, as detailed below
(click to enlarge image), fell by double-digit rates, ranging from an
11.4% drop at Gannett to a 71.3% plunge at Lee Enterprises, the latter
of which averted a potential default by refinancing its debt in the
final weeks of the year.
If you take the increase in News Corp.’s
stock price out of the mix, the average plunge in newspaper share value
last year was 30.1%. This compares with a 5.5% increase in the Dow
Jones average of 30 industrial stocks and the flat performance of the
Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which gained a meager 0.04% after
a year of dramatic market swings.
Minus the $45 billion market
capitalization of News Corp., the total value of the shares of the 10
other publishers at year’s end was a bit over $10 billion, or less than
three-quarters of the $13.9 billion that Gannett alone was worth at the
end of 2005, the year the industry set a record for the most advertising
sales in history.
and advertisers away from their core products.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2012/01/newspaper-shares-plunged-27-in-2011.html
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