Early "Black Friday" for NY Times, Media General

New York, N.Y.
The end of the week brought yet more bad news for several big media companies. Everywhere I went around town, I heard tales of layoffs --at Time-Warner, huge stock selloffs (Media General), slashed dividends (New York Times), as well as hushed conversations with journalists of all stripes. ("I'm worried about what's going to happen to this place.")
One shocker was just as the New York Times stock fell below $5/share on Friday, Morningstar announced that the stock is in fact worth 40% less than that. Morningstar analyst Tom Corbett slashed the estimated "fair value" of New York Times from $10/share all the way down to $3.

Investors were already dropping the Times stock on Friday because of the news after markets closed Thursday that the Times Co. was cutting its quarterly dividend by 74% to 6 cents a share, down from 23 cents in the prior quarter.

Morningstar appears to have based its downgrade largely on the Times Co.'s severe debt and cash-flow problems that we've been watching closely here.
Another industry giant, Media General lost 37.67% of its value Friday to close at $1.39/share. The losses were almost completely caused by a giant selloff by the Harbinger Capital Partners Master Fund, a hedge fund.

David Weir

David Weir is a veteran journalist who has worked at Rolling Stone, California, Mother Jones, Business 2.0, SunDance, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, MyWire, 7x7, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which he cofounded in 1977. He’s also been a content executive at KQED, Wired Digital, Salon.com, and Excite@Home. David has published hundreds of articles and three books,including "Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets Its Story," and has been teaching journalism for more than 20 years at U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Stanford.

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