Morning Post
McClatchy has sold it’s largest paper–The Star Tribune–for half of what it bought it for in 1998. I was working for the company when they bought it and everyone was told how important the buy was and that we’d have to tighten our belts. Wonder what they’re saying on the inside now.
Menawhile,
• Expect some John Edwards news any minute now.
• President Ford dies
• Yesterday, the Post had a good breakdown of the new chiefs of staff for top congressional committees
• Josh made me read a post by Dennis Parager and I now feel icky (mostly because there were two ads for Ann Coulter on the page–shudder)
• Al Kamen on Dr. Video
Well, I don’t know if saying it was sold for half of what McClatchy paid for it. I was checking out the Wikipedia entry for the Star-Tribune and it said “In 1998 The McClatchy Company purchased Cowles Media Company and sold off its other holdings, keeping the Star Tribune.” So the $1.2 billion was for all of the the Cowles holdings. I don’t know what else there was besides the Star-Tribune, but they apparently sold the rest off, so to say that they sold it for half what they paid may be bit misleading, since they didn’t pay all that money for just that property. I know they paid off the entire debt in under two years. The Star-Trib was a big money maker but I can’t believe they made $1.2 billion in extra profit to pay off that debt just selling newspapers. If they were able to sell off some other holdings to help take a chunk of that debt out, that would all make more sense. Also, McClatchy gets some sort of tax incentive of about $300 million for unloading it so that makes the sale worth about $800 million, which brings it a little closer to the original mark.