March 29, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: New Tribune Chief Signals Greater Television Focus

Two-thirds of the Tribune Company’s revenues currently come from the newspapers it owns. But that most likely won’t be true a year from now.

Peter Liguori, who was named the new chief executive of the company this week, said Friday that he was open both to selling some of the newspapers and buying more television stations. While he made no definitive statements on the matter, his sentiments lined up with investors’ expectations that Tribune will focus more on television and the Internet in the future.

Tribune emerged from bankruptcy at the end of December. It is now controlled by a number of private equity firms and banks. The company’s new board elected Mr. Liguori, a longtime television executive, to be chief executive on Thursday.

“I do think you’re going to see more television focus,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday, calling TV a “great opportunity” for the company. Tribune owns stations in big cities across the country, and operates a cable channel called WGN America that reaches about 75 million homes.

Mr. Liguori said he wanted to introduce more original programming on WGN America, including in prime time, and on the local stations. The stations, he said, “are a platform to introduce fresh, original content. If we own or co-own the content, that provides new revenue streams for us. We’ve yet to begin that fight, really.”

Then he brought up the statistic about two-thirds of the company’s revenue emanating from newspapers. Tribune owns The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and an assortment of other smaller papers. Newspapers are the tradition of Tribune, going back to its founding more than 150 years ago, he said, “and on a daily basis we’re going to have to focus on furthering that.”

Mr. Liguori spoke of being more “digitally focused” with a “deadline every minute mentality.” He described the company’s reporter bylines as brands. But he didn’t back away from the possibility that Tribune may sell off some of the newspapers in the months to come.

“People have called about the newspapers,” he said. “There are suitors. As the chief executive I have a fiduciary responsibility to hear these suitors out — to kind of weed out the contenders from the pretenders. And to see if in fact these suitors are willing to recognize the true value of these newspapers.

“With all that being said, I still think job one is managing the newspapers well; creating the best possible journalism; being as efficient as possible; creating programs for advertisers. And by concentrating on running the newspapers on a daily basis, we’re going to create the greatest value for the company.”

Separately, Mr. Liguori said Tribune is “certainly open” to acquiring more television stations.

“There are opportunities for us to look into duopolies and there are opportunities for us to horse-trade stations with other groups,” he said.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/new-tribune-chief-signals-greater-television-focus/?partner=rss&emc=rss

For Local NBC Stations, Collaborative Journalism

In a sign of increasing collaboration between journalism groups, NBC on Tuesday will announce a series of partnerships between its television stations and nonprofit news organizations.

Effectively immediately, NBC’s station in Chicago will work with The Chicago Reporter blog and magazine; its station in Philadelphia, with WHYY, a public radio station, and its community site NewsWorks; and its station in Los Angeles, with KPCC, a public radio station. All 10 of NBC’s stations will at times collaborate with ProPublica, the acclaimed investigative journalism nonprofit organization.

The partnerships — which NBC said would help its stations better cover their cities — are a byproduct of Comcast’s successful bid to gain control of NBC Universal, including the 10 television stations owned by NBC. As the government considered the bid last year, Comcast made a number of promises about news coverage, one of them being that it would set up such partnerships with at least five of its stations. The proposal was modeled after the relationship between the NBC station KNSD in San Diego and the local Web site voiceofsandiego.org.

The government subsequently put the partnership commitment in writing, and NBC started a casting call of sorts last May. Somewhat surprisingly, the company did not link exclusively with Web sites like voiceofsandiego.org, which is nationally recognized for its highly local journalism. Instead, it also teamed up with radio and print outlets. The Chicago Reporter, for instance, is a blog and bimonthly magazine that focuses on race and poverty issues and specializes in data analysis. WHYY, an affiliate of NPR, operates NewsWorks, a hyperlocal news site.

“We cast a wide net,” said Valari Staab, the president of the NBC-owned television stations. She said the local stations “looked for what organizations we thought could contribute unique content we couldn’t otherwise have.”

The partnerships will in some cases allow the stations to cover more news and conduct more investigations without adding more staff directly.

“The true value of the partnerships is helping local television affiliates, which have cut back under tough times in recent years, fill their many broadcast hours with valuable public service journalism,” said Scott Lewis, the chief executive of voiceofsandiego.org. At the same time, he said, the partnerships provide nonprofit news organizations with a new outlet for that journalism and an ability to “recover part of the costs in the process.”

NBC is making a donation to each of the partners. Ms. Staab would not specify the amounts. She said she anticipated that in relationships like the ones to be announced Tuesday, “different people will bring different things to the table.”

Independent local news sites might have data-mining experts who identify trends, and then “our people will make television out of it,” she said, “and talk to the people they need to talk to and get responses to what’s shown in that data.”

NBC has taken several steps this year to shore up its 10 local stations, which suffered from financial cuts before Comcast took over the company. It has added newscasts, replaced live television trucks and hired reporters in most of its markets.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0ced0e8542ba584e1206e692b4dcbb02

DealBook: Investors Call for 4-Way Breakup of McGraw-Hill

Harold W. McGraw III, chief executive of McGraw-Hill.Daniel Acker/Bloomberg NewsHarold W. McGraw III, chief executive of McGraw-Hill, has promised an announcement later this year.

6:32 p.m. | Updated

The activist investors pushing for change at McGraw-Hill have finally unveiled their vision for the company. And it is to break up the media conglomerate into four parts.

Jana Partners and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, who met with McGraw-Hill’s management for about an hour at the company’s headquarters on Monday, are hoping to cleave the publisher into its components, including an education business and an information and media arm. It would also split Standard Poor’s into its indexes operations and its ratings and financial business, according to a presentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The investors’ rationale is that together, the four units share little in common operationally and have different, sometimes conflicting capital needs. At the same time, the high-growth operations like Standard Poor’s have been hidden by the low growth at divisions like publishing and education.

Together, the two investors own a 5.2 percent stake in McGraw-Hill.

Many of Jana’s recommendations are in line with the thinking of research analysts. According to Goldman Sachs, McGraw-Hill is undervalued by 20 percent compared with its peers.

McGraw-Hill was already in the middle of reviewing its portfolio of businesses by the time Jana and the Ontario Teachers fund built up their stake, and Harold W. McGraw III, its chief executive, has said the company expects to make a major announcement in the second half of the year.

It has already hired Goldman Sachs and Evercore Partners to explore potential alternatives and has mandated Morgan Stanley with selling off several television stations. The TV stations are likely to be sold by the end of September, according to a person briefed on the matter.

“McGraw-Hill enjoys an open dialogue with its many shareholders and often gets insights from those discussions,” a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman, Patti Röckenwagner, said in a statement. “While not commenting on specific discussions, McGraw-Hill’s portfolio review is well advanced and expected to result in significant actions in the next few months to accelerate global growth, align appropriate cost structures and build shareholder value.”

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the investors’ plan is the proposed changes for S.P., which includes both the ratings arm and a profitable business that licenses the company’s namesake index of 500 stocks. Jana and the Ontario Teachers fund have recommended that S.P.’s ratings business appoint a “well-known independent oversight figure” to handle government relations, especially in light of the unit’s downgrading the United States’s credit rating to AA+ from AAA.

Privately, McGraw-Hill considers the proposal by Jana and Ontario Teachers a way to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks, according to people briefed on the matter. McGraw-Hill was already exploring spinning off its education business around March, and an announcement could be made in the next month or two, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The company sees that unit as capable of standing on its own, with strong cash flows that nonetheless has been dragging down the rest of the company with its low growth.

But McGraw-Hill believes that creating four separate units would leave none of them, apart from education, capable of standing on their own. Instead, the company is likely to divest noncore assets like some magazine titles. It will also continue initiatives that the investors support, including speeding up a share buyback plan and cutting more costs.

For their part, Jana and Ontario Teachers insist that their approach is genuine and not a negotiating tactic.

Shares in McGraw-Hill have fallen roughly 11 percent since Jana and Ontario Teachers unveiled their stake at the beginning of the month. They closed on Monday at $37.04, up 4 cents for the day.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a16dfaffed6fdf3e75eb8b05cb107b73