As if the media business needed any more bad news, this week the Journal Resister Company — the national parent of a handful of mid-market newspapers, including the Lorain Morning Journal and Willoughby News-Herald — announced they were seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But piggybacking off that bad news was a silver lining of sorts: Digital First Media, JRC’s owner, says it’s close to a possible sale.
The company says this won’t impact the day-to-day at the publications, but obviously that’s some corporate-speak bull, especially considering the company’s recent history.
This latest bankruptcy comes only three years after JRC shouldered out of another restructuring with more than $225 million in debt, according to a blog post from the company’s top man, John Paton.
Since taking the wheel after that initial bankruptcy, Paton has become a sort of corporate patron saint for the newspaper industry, an old school print guy who now evangelizes about ditching the dead tree emphasis for the web. Last November, the New York Times’ David Carr profiled the guy, here summing up some of the executive’s out-of-the-box ideas for shaking up the newsroom:
This article appears in Sep 5-11, 2012.
The problem with today’s main stream media is not equipment or even the ability to manipulate data and files and arrange them in nice little boxes for consumer consumption. The problem is that good investigated reporting is no longer encouraged by the main stream. In fact, our last thirty years of news publishing has been typical of the new lawyer and bean-counter and MBA driven business cultures of the USA. Prosfessionals on all levels are man-handled by a group of bottom-line fools who control the purse strings and often make decisions on a very primitive level: 1) Liabilities are the driver of most of our businesses of today. The decisions are made by how much exposure is perceived by the lawyers and bean-counters and business degrees of an organization. Inovation has been killed by the new conservative educational dominance in our colleges and schools of today.
Not a good sign. another one bites the dust.