Zuckerman Unbowed

In August, New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman boasted to Forbes' Dirk Smillie about his $200 million investment to revitalize his tabloid with new printing presses—yes, printing presses.

"We are transforming the product," Zuckerman said. "These presses will give us 120 to 160 pages of fantastic, magazine-quality color with incredible speed and efficiency. There is only one other printing plant in the U.S. that approximates this kind of visual experience. We will leapfrog every newspaper in America. That said, I'm not trying to pretend this is going to make the Daily News hugely profitable. I'm doing this, to be candid with you, as much as anything else because I'm addicted to the print press. I've been a fanatic about journalism since I was 12 years old."

Asked if he had other plans for acquisitions, he said, "I'm going to focus on the new presses I'm buying."

Those new presses rolled this month, as Crain's New York's Matthew Flamm reported two weeks ago. "The new year will bring significant changes,” Daily News editor Martin Dunn told Flamm. “They will be true to the Daily News brand, but a modernized version." The News has a circulation of about 544,167 (per the Audit Bureau of Circulation, cited by Editor & Publisher), which is down 13.98 percent this year. The News is still ahead of its main rival, News Corp.'s New York Post, which is down 18.77 percent, with 508,042 circulation.

Just so you don't think the News is betting all its deep-pocketed owner's money on the past, the paper just bought a "major" stake in Loud3r, a Pasadena, California-based news aggregation company, according to paidContent's Rafat Ali. (So much for that "focus on the new presses," Mort!)

Ali offers no figure for Zuckerman's investment in Loud3r, but puts it at "multimillion." The company is less than a year old, and, per its own About section, "is a content aggregation platform that finds, filters, and publishes the best news, blogs, photos, videos, and social media about any topic. We use a combination of technology and human experts to find the hottest, freshest, most relevant content on the Web about the things that you really care about."

According to a report from Venture Beat's Anthony Ha in June, the company had originally tried to launch its own niche news sites but has reconceived itself as a provider of aggregation technology, not content.

So, as 2010 begins, it looks like Zuckerman is hedging his bets on both print and digital.

Clearly, the guy likes a good gamble: As you might recall, in October Zuckerman fantasized to Smillie and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd about how much money publishers could make if newspapers could run gambling books.

If print wins, so will Zuckerman. If digital prevails, well, he'll probably be OK too.