It all started with a newspaper, but for the second year in a row, Journal Communications’ annual earnings statement depicts a broadcaster that owns some publishing properties – not a publisher that owns a handful of broadcasting outlets.
And while both segments of the company showed profits last year, they continue to navigate a new normal in the media business. The days when a media property was the clichéd license to print money have been gone for a long time.
Broadcast accounted for 52 percent of the total 2011 revenue at the owner of Milwaukee’s daily newspaper as well as one of the city’s leading TV outlets and two of its top radio stations. That’s up just a bit from 2010’s 51.6 percent – the first year in which publishing accounted for less than half the company’s revenues. The numbers [PDF] are found in the company’s Form 10-K filed with the SEC on Friday.
When it comes to operating profits, the difference is even starker. For 2011, broadcast operating profits totaled $31 million – nearly double the $15.9 million for publishing. (Net profits for the two segments aren’t broken out.)
Yet while both segments are down from 2010, broadcast profits actually fell further and harder, dropping nearly 29 percent while publishing profits fell 12.7 percent.
Overall revenue for the corporation, meanwhile, was down 5 percent, to $356.8 million in 2011.
With growing optimism for the nascent economic recovery – as well as another year to measure the effects of the Journal Sentinel pay wall – the results for 2012 this time next year may be even more interesting.
And in just a handful of the countless items of interest that have crossed the Pressroom Buzz official browser recently …
The Rural Blog at the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues reports on “ag gag” bills like one that Iowa recently enacted, penalizing activists who sneak into farming operations with hidden cameras to document the abuse of animals. But the local Humane Society isn’t the only likely target; such measures could have implications for journalists as well.
Did anyone else notice that a Journal Sentinel story on a planned mosque in Brookfield did not have comments enabled? I can make an educated guess as to why – but in the end that’s just speculation. I’ve made an inquiry and will report back if I get an answer.
At the Columbia Journalism Review, Pressroom Buzz’s Most Loyal Reader points us to a graphic that lays out in depressing detail just what a couple of huge golden parachutes recently awarded to departing news executives at Gannett and the New York Times Co. could have paid for in this era of continued newsroom cutbacks. Salt in the wound: CJR notes that the tenures of the two – Janet Robinson at Times and Craig Dubow at Gannett – “coincided with the most financially devastating period in the history of newspapers.”
Belated thanks to Bill Lueders at Wisconsin Watch for mentioning my recent coverage of both his news organization and Wisconsin Reporter. If you haven’t seen my story, you can find it here, along with a follow-up here.
Speaking of Wisconsin Reporter, after those stories ran, Chad Nodland, editor at NorthDecoder.com, sent me a link to the result of his recent inquiries there about WR‘s sponsor the Franklin Center, which is or was nominally headquartered there. NorthDecoder.com is a North Dakota pro-Democratic Party political blog. The piece mixes speculation, political invective and some interesting facts dug up from the center’s IRS Form 990.
And it has nothing to do with the balmy weather that’s blown in, but this is Sunshine Week – the annual open government and freedom of information promotion from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. My colleague Steve Schuster wrote about it recently.
Finally, from Paid Content, this rumination on the five companies that, in one way or another, dominate today’s media landscape the way the Big Three networks did three decades ago.
