I Have GOT To Get Out Of This Business, Part X

I've highlighted the thing about irony in the middle.

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Newspapers, reeling from slumping ads, slash jobs

By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer

Sun Jun 29, 2:55 PM ET

Even for an industry awash in bad news, the newspaper business went through one of its most severe retrenchments in recent memory last week.

Half a dozen newspapers said they would slash payrolls, one said it would outsource all its printing, and Tribune Co., one of the biggest publishers in the country, said it might sell its iconic headquarters tower in Chicago and the building that houses the Los Angeles Times.

The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it's too hard to tell how far the slump will go.

"They're in survival mode now," said Mike Simonton, a media analyst at Fitch Ratings, a credit analysis agency.

"We had very grim expectations for the sector," Simonton said, and publishers have either met or surpassed his estimates for how bad the results would be.

Last week alone, deep staff cuts were announced at The Hartford Courant and The (Baltimore) Sun — two Tribune papers — as well as at the Daytona Beach-Journal, while The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press said they hoped to reduce the head count in their joint operations by 7 percent through buyouts. The Boston Herald said up to 160 employees would be laid off as it outsourced its printing operations, and in a memo explaining the terms of its job security pledge, the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., said it is operating in the red. The week before, McClatchy Co. said companywide staff cuts of 10 percent were coming.

Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its "underutilized" real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.

Tribune has already reached a deal to sell one of its largest newspapers, Long Island-based Newsday, but ran into delays early this month in liquidating Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, when negotiations for the field's purchase by a state agency broke down over financing. Tribune is also moving to sell the Cubs.

Tribune has enough money to meet its debt requirements this year, bond analysts have said, but it must make headway on asset sales in order to meet its obligations in 2009.

Tribune's troubles reflect broader problems in the industry, where a deepening economic downturn is worsening losses from a long-term shift away from print advertising toward online, especially in classified categories like help wanted, autos and real estate, where rivals such as Craigslist, Move.com and AutoTrader.com are thriving.

Advertising is by far the most important source of revenue for newspapers. And in the first quarter, their overall ad revenue slumped 12.9 percent, led by a 24.9 percent drop-off in classifieds, compared with the same period a year earlier.

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In fact, the industry group that compiles and releases ad revenue figures, the Newspaper Association of America, this month stopped putting out quarterly press releases with the numbers, though it quietly updated them on its Web site.

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NAA spokeswoman Sheila Owens said in an e-mailed statement that the organization will now put out press releases only with full-year data "to keep the market focused on the longer-term industry transition from print to a multiplatform medium."

Some say complacency in the industry about the threat the Internet posed is to blame for the current quagmire.

Speaking on the CNBC business news cable channel Friday, Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who is now Tribune's CEO, said newspapers have historically been "monopolies" in their local markets and "insulated from reality," according to a transcript of his remarks provided by CNBC.

Going forward, if ad revenues continue to slide rapidly, companies including Journal Register Co., MediaNews Group Inc. and — in the absence of further asset sales — Tribune could then risk violating their loan terms, said Emile Courtney, a media industry credit analyst for Standard & Poor's.

Already, just two major publishers have investment-grade debt under S&P's ratings — Gannett Co. and The New York Times Co. The industry is divided between them and "everybody else," Courtney said.

Given the current poor climate for the business, he said: "I have doubts banks will be as willing as they were in the past to waive or amend covenants."

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Now playing: Godsmack - Awake
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Out and Back: Sonic

I freely admit that sometimes I get bugged by things that, frankly, I know shouldn't bug me.

For years the Sonic drive-thru chain would buy national ad spots during games or shows I watch a lot, and it always bothered me a little bit because a) I'd never heard of Sonic; and b) once I discovered what Sonic was, I also discovered that there weren't any within about 300 miles of me.

Well, not long ago, that changed, and New Jersey got a Sonic. And by "a Sonic", I mean "exactly one Sonic."

(Route 9 North, Waretown, N.J.)

In retrospect, I don't know how I almost drove past the place. Possibly mental fatigue from thinking "Where the hell IS IT?" for the last five miles of the drive. Seriously, no building has ever looked more out of place for where it is than this one. You can't really tell from that shot.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think those drive-up stations in the background are for paying with credit or debit cards. I didn't give that a spin because if you're so paranoid about carrying cash that you don't have enough on you for drive-thru fast food, you've got problems I'm not qualified to solve. There is no interior seating that I could see, by the way - they have a patio outside where I actually saw someone get food brought out to his table, but I don't think you're getting inside the building unless you're wearing the uniform.

I wasn't tremendously hungry at this point, so I just got a Coney (what they call a hot dog) with chili and cheese, fries and one of their Famous orange slushes. I capitalize "Famous" because they do it and, as the first-timer, I feel I have to take their word for it.



While I railed on the use of foil paper at Roy Rogers, this probably is the best way to store a drive-thru hot dog.


Plating is not my strong suit. It certainly isn't theirs.

The food was about as nondescript as it gets, which may actually be a good thing. The chili cheese dog tasted like, well, a hot dog with chili and cheese on it. The fries were salted almost perfectly. (This reminds me that my ketchup consumption has plummeted as I've gotten older.)

Sonic makes a big deal about drinks. It's their hook, like how McDonald's puts "Mc-" in front of everything. Sonic's thing is they have a menu of flavors you can add to any drink if you want, so if you want a cherry-flavored Diet Coke, you can get a Diet Coke and ask them to add cherry flavoring to it. Or a Sprite with vanilla (ew). Or even root beer and Powerade, which seems like something you'd drink before going on a mass crime spree.

This was the star of the day:


That's a quality frozen beverage. It may not look like it (blame the photographer), but it is. You'll just have to trust me. Good flavor, structurally sound, not watery, and it holds up - an hour later it was about the same consistency on top and hadn't turned into a melted, syrupy mess.

The topper was unexpected, and, I believe, a fast-food first:


Yep. That's a Sonic after-meal mint. I didn't believe it, either.

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Now playing: Wu Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off)
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Grand Theft Cable

Up until the end, this post was supposed to be titled "Unplugged" and it was supposed to be about how I spent at least 36 hours outside the Information Age. No TV, no cable, no Internet. It was supposed to be about how shockingly productive I was without being able to switch on and drop out. I might have even thrown in a life lesson or two, or said something pithy about how we need to disconnect every once in a while in order to reconnect with the world around us.

But that, as we say in my business, would be "burying the lede."

And the lede is this: I got my cable stolen.

Our story begins late Tuesday night, when I got home from work and turned the TV on, flipping channels while waiting for Poker After Dark to start. There's no picture. This, by itself, isn't particularly unusual - I just figured the cable had gone out for one reason or another, possibly weather-related. So I figured it wasn't anything more than that. But it went on (or didn't, as the case may be) for a little longer, and I just figured the cable was OUT out for whatever reason and went to bed.

I got up on Wednesday, still nothing. Or possibly nothing again; I'm not sure at the moment. My Internet wasn't working, either. And again, I didn't really think that much of it because I assumed it was being fixed. So I went out hunting for a new battery for my digital camera (which I'd found two days earlier after having it go missing for three months, but that story's not nearly as interesting) as well as my bi-weekly grocery shopping trip. No luck on the battery. There's a non-zero chance they don't make it any more.

I got home... still nothing. Now it's officially ridiculous. I called the cable company - it's about 8 by this point - and they told me they'd send somebody over the next day (today, now).

Now it's today. And we've all been there with the cable company. They tell you 10 to 12 and it's always closer to 12 than 10. In this case, it was after 12 when the guy finally called (I'd actually called them again just to make sure I didn't miss their call the first time) and he said he'd be over in 10 minutes or so.

When he showed up, he immediately told me to turn my TV on. I did. It came on.

What he said next was the last thing I expected I'd hear.

Apparently what happened was one of my neighbors had enterprisingly gotten into an outside cable connection and cut off a set of fittings, then illegally hooked up his own to that set. The set they cut off happened to be mine.

I was stunned. I actually said, "I didn't think this still happened in 2008."

By this point my modem had come back online too. I didn't think to ask how he knew what had happened, but he had obviously checked the box outside and cut off the illegal connection before he came in to see me. He did cut me some new connectors because my picture had gone fuzzy, so that was nice of him.

After he left, I plopped down in my chair and just started laughing. I got my cable stolen. In 2008. Think about that. It's absurd.

Semi-related tangent: The first story that came up on Yahoo after I started Firefox: the LifeLock guy getting nailed. Seriously, who didn't see that one coming.

Arch Rivals

We all have them.

For Superman, it's Lex Luthor. For Batman, the Joker. For Chris Webber, the game clock. For Roger Clemens, it may or may not be his penis.

It took me over 33 years, but I've finally discovered mine.

Tires.

I've had three tires go flat on me in the last two years on two different cars.

The latest was Saturday. I'm pulling out of my apartment complex to go to work, and I round a corner and bump something, but I don't think anything of it. A couple miles later, a dashboard light comes on and I feel the car starting to slow down. So I pull into the local repair shop - which, irony of ironies, happens to be closed and would have been open two hours earlier - and take a look.

The right front tire, which I thought I'd bumped, was fine. It was the right rear tire that I would later discover had a hole punched in the side. So I go to take the hubcap off so I can put the spare on, and I swear the lugnuts were fused to the wheels at the molecular level. I mean, I admit to not being the strongest guy out there, but this was ridiculous. So that took 30 minutes.

A couple days later, I go back to get it looked at and possibly replaced. I say "possibly" because they didn't have one in stock. I'm not sure how a tire place doesn't have the tire you need. It's a little like an Italian restaurant running out of mozzarella sticks. Which has also happened to me. So I had to drive around on the donut spare for an extra day.

Tires, man... tires. I need something to combat this evil in my life. Perhaps one of these:

Sign (or Tag) of the Times

We'll ignore the fact that I'm on a relative shoe shopping spree (Two pairs in two weeks for the first time in two years! I'm out of CONTROL!) to point out something both odd and disconcerting I saw tagged to my new pair of dress shoes:

"AIRPORT FRIENDLY
No steel shank"

And on the back:

"This shoe affords all the comfort and support of a normal steel shank, without the anticipated travel delays. So pick up a pair. And proceed directly to your gate at the airport."

Hmmm.

Gas Face

(click the title for the story)

This rest stop is actually the entry point for a popular shortcut that gets me to work five days a week. And yes, in the past couple of days, that gas station has been packed. It didn't occur to me what was happening until I remembered the rules the state has with gas stations at service plazas. I also admit I wasn't really paying attention to the price of gas and hadn't noticed that it had gone up so dramatically. (Hooray high fuel efficiency.)

What's particularly unusual about this is that gas at service areas like this is always more expensive than it is on roads because you're at the mercy of limited access. So having all of those people driving to the Parkway just to get off, get gas, and then possibly not get back onto the Parkway just to go back to their own homes some 10-15 miles away really fucks up your paradigms. It's the height of degeneracy.

Of course, when it does go up on Friday, it'll be $3.47.

So did I actually get gas from there when I came home from work Tuesday night? Of course I did. What a ridiculous question. :)

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Now playing: The White Stripes - You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)
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I Have GOT To Get Out Of This Business, Part IX

Yes, I'm still alive. Which is more than I can say for my former employers:

Journal Register Company Considering Bankruptcy Filing

Journal Register weighs restructuring

"Earlier this week, the New York Stock Exchange notified the company that its share price was too low and that it might be delisted."

By "too low" they mean "under $1 a share", and by that they mean "28 cents at the close of today's market."

I remember it being big news when the company went public in... I want to say 1999, but it may have been 1998. If the worst-case scenario comes to pass here, it'd be even bigger news.

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Now playing: Pearl Jam - Glorified G
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