Media Company Values Crashing Down, Down, Down

First, an update of yesterday's news. The New York Times today has clarified what was reported yesterday by Forbes, and repeated by us that it would be closing its IHT.com site in Paris. The Times says that in fact it is simply merging the IHT and NYT brands, with the former henceforth representing its global "edition."

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The turmoil in the markets sent stocks diving to new lows today, as central banks around the world struggle to implement ever more extreme measures to quell the growing signs of global panic. Media companies are now facing an almost certain decline in Q-4 advertising across the board. Although retail outlets will of course have to but advertising to try and stave off disaster, what will happen if some of them can't pay their bills by year's end?

This is one of the new nightmare scenarios being discused inside boardrooms and newsrooms.

From a pure content perspective, the global financial crisis has supplanted the U.S. Presidential election, as well as the many other election battles that only days ago were dominating the headlines. Sports, entertainment, non-economic news of all sort is being shuttled to the back pages for now.

There's nothing like monster crisis to make the news business exciting. But this particular tsunami carries with it the distinct possibility that many of those media companies covering it may themselves get driven out of business before the storm runs its course.

Thus, keeping an eye on stock prices, we note that the Times lost over 8 percent of its remaining value today, closing at $12.17 and a market cap of $1.75 billion. McClatchy crashed down by more than 18 percent to only $3.77 and a market cap of 310.78 million.

These are scary days for some of the most storied names in American journalism. And it's probably going to get worse, potentially much worse, before it gets better.