Sign In
SHARE
Why Isn't Sam Zell Selling the LA Times?
Here's what I don't understand about the crazy-desperate moves that Sam Zell is making at the LA Times, like judging journalists by the number of column-inches they generate, or removing all the editorial employees at the the magazine and moving it to the business side - something Jeff Bercovici says could "spark a mutiny".
Clearly, Zell has ended up owning a property quite different from the business he thought he was buying. And equally clearly these measures are a panicked response to a worse-than-expected P&L, rather than the kind of thing he was planning to do all along. But what he's doing is systematically chopping away at any value the LA Times has, in a desperate attempt to stop it from bleeding money. As Mike Kinsley says:
It won't be long before he figures out that you can have an equal number of advertising and editorial pages if you have none of either and simply stop publishing the paper. That way you won't have to employ any journalists at all.
Right now, however, the LA Times does, very much, have value: David Geffen and Eli Broad and probably a few other local billionaires as well are seriously interested in buying it and investing in it. Why kill yourself and the paper to squeeze out the profits needed to pay down the company's huge pile of leveraged debt, when you can just sell the bloody thing, just like you did Newsday, and be done?
Zell has his flagship newspaper: he's a Chicago man, and he owns the Chicago Tribune. He neither wants nor needs the LA Times for vanity purposes. So why does he still own it?
Loading...
Thank you for registering as a Portfolio.com Insider. Your comment has been added.
Create Your Public Profile
- The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
- Apr 27 2009 9:26AM EDT
- Sinking Animal Spirits
- Apr 27 2009 8:45AM EDT
- Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
- Apr 26 2009 10:00AM EDT
- Be Your Own Counterfeiter
- Apr 26 2009 9:36AM EDT
- Being Tim Geithner
- Apr 25 2009 12:37PM EDT
- Notes From a Press Conference Naif
- Apr 25 2009 9:41AM EDT
- What Good is the News?
- Apr 25 2009 8:32AM EDT
- Stressful Enough
- Apr 24 2009 2:29PM EDT
- Not Regretting the Pound
- Apr 24 2009 1:09PM EDT
- Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
- Apr 24 2009 9:47AM EDT
- Non-Economic Questions of the Day
- Apr 24 2009 9:12AM EDT
- The Stress Test Blind Alley
- Apr 24 2009 8:36AM EDT
- Happy Hour
- Apr 23 2009 9:40PM EDT
- Recovery Without Rebalancing
- Apr 23 2009 6:13PM EDT
- The Shape of Your Recession
- Apr 23 2009 5:11PM EDT
Archive
Categories
Links
- Email Ryan Avent
- Econospeak
- Financial Crookery
- The Epicurean Dealmaker
- Naked Capitalism
- Alphaville
- Marginal Revolution
- The Panelist
- FP Passport
- Overcoming Bias
- Andrew Leonard
- Barry Ritholtz
- Brad Setser
- Carbon Tax Center
- Calculated Risk
- Greg Mankiw
- Free Exchange
- Dean Baker
- Alexander Campbell
- Kash Mansori
- The Bayesian Heresy
- A Fistful of Euros
- John Quiggin
- Michael Mandel
- Lance Knobel
- Mark Thoma
- Dan Gross
- Curbed
- Streetsblog
- Chris Anderson
- Deal Journal
- MarketBeat
- DealBook
- DealBreaker
- Carl Bialik
- Michelle Leder
- Brad DeLong
- Ultimi Barbarorum
