Monday, January 23, 2012

Newspaper shares plunged 27% in 2011

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


No comments:

Post a Comment