JRC Death Watch

Couldn't happen to a bunch of nicer guys. Love the part about the debt in the next-to-last graf.


NEW YORK, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Journal Register Co. <JRC.N> on Tuesday said that its former second-largest shareholder has sold nearly all of its shares in the newspaper publisher.

Private Capital Management owns 74,600 shares in the Yardley, Pennsylvania-based publisher, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That compares with a filing on June 30 when Private Capital Management owned nearly 3 million shares.

A spokesman for Private Capital Management confirmed the change, but declined to say why it decreased its stake. A Journal Register official was not immediately available for comment.

Journal Register had 39,530,000 shares outstanding as of their last quarterly report in July.

Private Capital Management and chief investment officer Bruce Sherman spearheaded the effort to get the former second-largest U.S. newspaper publisher, Knight Ridder Inc., to sell itself after failing to boost its lagging stock price.

Knight Ridder sold itself to publisher McClatchy Co. <MNI.N> earlier this year for $4.5 billion.

Journal Register, like other newspaper publishers, has been hard hit by a downturn in advertising and circulation. The company's stock has fallen about 60 percent since the beginning of the year and closed on Tuesday at $5.98 per share on the New York Stock Exchange.

"This really strikes me as a culmination of several bad things happening at Journal Register," said Murray Schwartz, a former senior executive at the company that became Journal Register, and currently a mergers and acquisitions attorney at law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP.

Lower circulation has resulted in lower market reach, Schwartz said, giving advertisers reason to look elsewhere to reach their audiences. He also cited the company's debt, which at the end of 2005 was about 77 percent of its total market capitalization.

Journal Register in September said it would cut 82 jobs in its Michigan cluster of newspapers and in August put its daily and weekly newspapers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island up for sale.

 

Sometimes, bad things happen to bad people.

Fuck you Jelenic. Hope there's no golden parachute there for you.

 

How can you screw up a business that badly? Your debt is 77% of your total market cap? My God, even the dumbest business school student can see that's bad news. How do you let yourself get put in that spot?

 

Oh, but there is. Happy-Face Bob just negotiated a cushy new buyout deal (filed with the SEC on 9/27) providing him with a payoff of several million bucks, computers and cars for $1.00, continued country-club memberships, secretarial services and health care, yadda yadda, you name it.

All the working professionals Bob elbows out of the workforce get nothing but the dust off his nuts, but Bob will get millions should the company he's now steered straight into the ground decide to push him out the door.

Easy. He did the same thing with Ingersoll, the misbegotten mutant bastard parent company of JRC, 15 years ago, when he helped guide that company straight down the fucking toilet, too.

 

Of course, if the company goes bankrupt -- as its headed -- creditors can challenge that in court... we hope.

 

I keep thinking that before long, CNHI should be in a similar predicament. The company overpaid for a number of papers in its chain. It's been able to use creative accounting to mask that fact for some time, but the balloon has got to pop soon.

 

I wonder if it'll be the Michigan acquisition that pushed JRC over the edge.

Hope those fuckers rot in Hell.

Here's the question, though: Would a new owner actually put money into those newspapers? Many of those rags are on life support.

 

A newspaper owner? Put money into the product?

Pass me some of what you're smoking, Wicked.

 

Maybe they'd put money into it when they realized the places are sweatshops.

"Next on Dateline NBC: Sweatshops in your own back yard."

"Stone Phillips takes a look at a centralized Journal Register Company office where employees are forced to use old, harsh newsprint for toilet paper and water regularly is recycled from the bathroom for coffee pot use."