Cox To Unload Austin Paper, Others

Posted on August 13th, 2008 4:24pm by Glenn Hunter
Filed under Business, Local News, Media

Our buddy David Johnson, the KRLD business analyst and contributor to D CEO, points out that Cox Enterprises wants to sell the Austin American-Statesmen and a bunch of other papers, several of them in Texas. That’s pretty big news in the media world.

10 comments

  1. Indeed…if someone wanted to grow a Texas newspaper empire the papers in Waco, Longview, Marshall, Lufkin and Nacogdoches are for sale as well as Austin.

    @ 4:57 pm on August 13, 2008

  2. Alternate headline:

    “Big Cox Expects Shrinkage”

    @ 5:00 pm on August 13, 2008

  3. Blame those danged internets.

    @ 5:40 pm on August 13, 2008

  4. Maybe Wick will buy the Texas papers. Then the readers in Austin, Waco, Longview et. al will get top 10 pretty people or top ten shoe salesmen or top 10 florists!

    @ 6:15 pm on August 13, 2008

  5. This could be a great set of properties to buy for either AH Belo or Hearst.

    @ 9:17 pm on August 13, 2008

  6. Belo can’t get figure out
    how to get their finger out of their ass.

    They can’t make a big metro newspaper profitable. What makes you think they can buy anything at this point? Especially, with all the layoffs, buyouts, and loss of ad revenue.

    @ 9:37 pm on August 13, 2008

  7. I never thought I’d say this, but I kind of agree with Roman.

    Belo’s in no position to purchase anything right now – and shouldn’t. If management was ever going to consider employee morale, that would be the time to do it – announcing you need to shed 500 employees and then purchasing another set of newspapers would send already low morale lower.

    That being said, newspapers continue to be profitable – just not at as big a margin as previous years. However, the product that profit is dependent on can’t be maintained quality-wise, so profit margins will continue to shrink.

    But yeah, the finger-bum equation is pretty much dead on.

    @ 9:46 pm on August 13, 2008

  8. Watching Steve Blow and Rod Dreher systematically pave the seamless transition to an interchangeable, generic crew from Bangalore supplying opinion columns on Fun Facts and Interesting Issues from anywhere and nowhere at a third of the cost has been morbidly fascinating in its own right, but the recent sight of the tortured DMN beast gnawing off its own limbs one after the other is becoming an outright adventure in Michael Vick entertainment. I’m almost ashamed to even read about it.

    @ 9:02 am on August 14, 2008

  9. DMN was actually going to outsource most of thier production of the newspaper to India.
    That was leaked from inside the company.

    @ 2:50 pm on August 14, 2008

  10. Because they’re the liberal media? Where’s the source on that one?

    @ 3:28 pm on August 14, 2008