Archive for January 16th, 2010
MediaNews Holding Company Will File For Bankruptcy Protection
Affiliated Media Inc., the holding company for MediaNews Group, plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The privately-held publisher of the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and St. Paul Pioneer Press noted in a statement that their newspapers would still be able to operate under their “pre-packed” plan.
But their bankruptcy protection plan has already been approved by lenders and would allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy quickly, according to the company.
“Unlike other media company reorganizations,” said the company in a release, “this one does not involve the newspaper operations or have any effect on employees or vendors of the newspapers. Only the holding company will restructure.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the holding company, Affiliated Media Inc., reached an agreement with its lenders for a streamlined bankruptcy that will hand a majority of new stock to creditors, a group led by Bank of America Corp. The company’s existing equity will be canceled, the holding company said.
Their current plan, according to the Los Angeles Times, will relieve company debt from $930 million to $165 million.
MediaNews Chief Executive Dean Singleton insisted earlier this year that his company was not at bankruptcy risk. According to the Wall Street Journal, the publisher’s prospects brightened recently with the closure of E.W. Scripps Co.’s Rocky Mountain News, which was part of a joint-operating agreement in Denver with MediaNews’ Denver Post.
Here’s more from the Canadian Press on how MediaNews’ finances crumbled:
The Hearst Corp., and the family of MediaNews co-founder Richard Scudder are giving up interests in MediaNews, according to a person who had knowledge of the plan but spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want discuss the plan publicly.
Singleton and Scudder, a 1935 Princeton University graduate from New Jersey, founded MediaNews in 1985. The two bought the Gloucester County Times in New Jersey in 1983 and formed MediaNews two years later. The company now owns 54 daily newspapers, including St. Paul Pioneer Press, as well as more than 100 non-daily newspapers, Web sites, television and radio broadcasters.
Hearst and MediaNews were involved in a complicated deal to acquire The Monterey County Herald and St. Paul Pioneer Press from McClatchy Co. in 2006. Hearst invested $317.3million in MediaNews, which then bought the two newspapers and the Torrance Daily Breeze from Hearst.
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See Also:
- CHART OF THE DAY: The End Of Newspapers
- Village Voice Editor, Lawyer Blast Against Bankruptcy Speculation
- Village Voice Denies Bankruptcy Speculation
NBC’s Jeff Zucker: Jay Leno Show Failed And ‘I Take Responsibility”
NBC’s executive Jeff Zucker is finally stepping forward to admit his late night offenses.
“At the end of the day Jay at 10 o’clock didn’t work,” Jeff Zucker chief executive of NBC Universal told the New York Times, “and I take responsibility for that.”
Instead of fueling money into more expensive, scripted content, he went with a cheap variety show lead by one of the network’s signature late night figures. His plan not only hurt the network, it also is causing one of the most ridiculous, public shamings of NBC in the past decade.
The Times‘ Tim Arango puts Zucker’s situation at NBC into context:
Less than a decade ago, according to Bob Wright, the former chief executive of NBC Universal, the network generated over $1 billion in profit for its parent, G.E.
This year, mainly because of high costs associated with broadcasting next month’s Winter Olympics, the network is expected to lose more than $100 million, according to a person briefed on the network’s finances who insisted on anonymity.
Meanwhile, G.E. is selling off their NBC Universal assets to Comcast, mainly so it can acquire its cash cow cable channels including USA, Bravo, Syfy — the same networks Zucker helped shoot to success.
According to Fred Silverman, a veteran executive who has worked on programming for ABC, CBS and NBC, the network’s prime-time schedule started to slip before Zucker took the reigns. “But what could have fixed it was not a lot of tricks,” he told the Times. “What could have reduced the downward trend was a couple of hit shows.”
Instead, Zucker and friends took advantage of the industry trend — mediocre reality shows made on the cheap — and slipped Jay Leno into a 10 p.m. slot.
NBC Universal’s head of entertainment Jeff Gaspin warned Zucker that affiliates were unhappy with ratings and ad revenue from the show.It was Gaspin’s idea to switch up the schedule back to its old format, bringing Jay to 11:35 p.m. and Conan to midnight. “That’s what he wanted to do, and I said, O.K., give it a shot,” Zucker said. As the Times‘ Arango notes, “The shot exploded in their faces.”
Read more from the Times, including an overview of the TV industry’s decline.
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See Also:
- Jeff Zucker Threatens to Ice Conan! "I’ll Keep You Off The Air For 3 1/2 Years"
- NBC’s Fail King: Comcast Should Give Jeff Zucker The Pink Slip
- The Numbers NBC Faced Before The Late Night Experiment Exploded
Nicolas Cage: $14 Million In Hock To The IRS
Nicolas Case, the brilliant, under-appreciated (and broke) actor, is apparently $14 million in debt to the IRS. That’s in addition to another $6.7 million in private debts that he’s accumulated.
His lawyer attributes the debt to a “recent legal situation”.
Don’t miss: How Cage spent like a drunken sailor and went from the top of the world to the poorhouse — >
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See Also:
- How Nicolas Cage Spent His Way To The Poorhouse
- How Lindsay Lohan Spent And Partied Her Way To The Poorhouse
- Lenny Dykstra Is Living In An Office Building And Says The Sheriff Will Have To Drag Him Out
Here’s Why The Russia-Belarus Conflict Is A Real Threat To Western Oil Supplies
(This guest post originally appeared at The Oil Drum and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License)
I hadn’t actually been paying much attention to the Russian:Belarus dispute over oil supplies. After the annual debacles that we are used to over natural gas supplies that flow from Russia to Western Europe through Ukraine, and which seem somewhat quiescent at the moment, I had failed to grasp how much Western supplies of oil from Russia flow through Belarus. But as is pointed out in Foreign Policy, the flow is significant, and this is a more far-reaching conflict than I grasped.
As a brief review:
In 2001, Belarus unilaterally canceled a contract that mandated the sharing of these revenues, leading to substantial losses for Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft and the Russian state budget. Now, Transneft is demanding that Belarus pay full import duties for the portion of Russian oil that it resells on the European market, a demand that could cost Belarus as much as $5 billion per year. The Belarusian government argues that the Russia-Belarus customs union obviates the need for Minsk to pay duty on imports from Russia. Although deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline have not, as of mid-January, been cut off, the prospect that Transneft (whose chairman is Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, a close confidant of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) will turn off the taps to force compliance from Minsk is clearly one that has European leaders worried because the European Union imports about a third of its oil from Russia, mostly via Belarus. Already, the prospect of supply disruptions has driven U.S. crude oil prices to a 15-month high, presumably to Moscow’s delight.
Well, as my post on Wednesday showed, I am not convinced that this conflict had a lot to do with the rise in oil prices (which actually dropped a little today, on their overall march upwards). But that does not lessen the longer-term impact of what is going on. It is, as it was with the Ukraine dispute, to with control, with Russia seeking to control fuel distribution in these countries, and through supply controls also influence the directions in which the country moves.
Russia is now warning that it will reduce oil flows to Belarus even further and wants the duty on the roughly 290,000 bd that is refined in Belarus and then exported to the West. At the moment the refineries in Belarus have a relatively short reserve (between a few days and a week, reportedly – depending on source) and the current contracts have expired.
Germany and Poland are believed to be hit hardest once Russia halts shipments through the Druzhba pipeline. Germany depends on Russian crude for about 15 percent of its total consumption, and Poland buys from Russia to meet 75 percent of its market demands.
Minsk has threatened to raise the transit fee for its European customers more than tenfold, from 3.9 dollars to 45 dollars per metric ton, should Moscow not agree to its conditions, RIA Novostinews agency quoted an unidentified expert close to the talks as saying.
At the moment the talks appear to be stalled. However they are not limited to the transit of oil. There is also a dispute over the transmission of electric power. Belarus acts as a transit country for power both to Kalingrad and to the countries of the Baltic. It has assumed somewhat greater urgency with the closure of the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania. The plant closed on December 31, and there are fears of greater dependence on Russia for future power. Russian complacency about the situation is not, I suspect, exactly helpful.
“It is inevitable that Russia is going to become a bigger supplier of energy to Europe and particularly to the Baltic countries. Ultimately there comes a point where you have to let the old days go,” Chris Weafer, chief strategist on Moscow’s Uralsib bank, told New Europe on 5 January, adding that the Baltics, which sorely need energy supplies, should adopt a pragmatic approach and rely on their eastern neighbor and forget the legacy of the Soviet Union. As long as Russia continues to try and build a modern and diversified economy with greater global integration, then it needs the goodwill of the West just as much as the West needs Russia’s energy.
Bids for construction of a new plant are due to be submitted by the end of this month, with the hope of getting the new plant on line by 2018. (Kalingrad is hoping to have its own reactor in about the same time frame).
In the interim the Baltic states are going to be dependent, not only on Russia for their electricity and oil, but also on satisfactory conditions to allow the transit of both through Belarus on their way.
Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, there is an election underway, with initial voting to take place on Sunday. It is perhaps for that reason that there have been no major gas disruptions so far this year. Anger with the current administration is giving a bit of a boost to a third candidate, so perhaps it is in Russia’s best interests to retain a low profile at this point. In fact Russia is claiming credit for keeping the UK supplied with gas as supplies from Norway dropped due to bad weather at some of the production sites. However Russia is also being nice to Turkey as insurance just in case it will still need to do some bypassing around Ukraine to supply Western Europe after the election is over.
Not that conditions in Ukraine itself have been unaffected. There are some 175 towns and villages that are reported to be still without power, due to the bad weather. This is a decided improvement from the 1,598 who lost power in the Dec 29th storm. At least they are more used to the cold.
Those in Florida who aren’t, and plugged in too many heaters, are also causing power outages down there.
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See Also:
- Europe Held Hostage As Russia-Belarus Oil Pipeline Talks Collapse
- Gazprom’s Export Dreams Shattered As America Blows Past Russia To Become The Saudi Arabia Of Natural Gas
- IT’S BACK: Russia Revives Plans For A Nuclear Rocket
BREAKING: Savers Still Don’t Make Jack
As seen on the streets of Brooklyn, a screaming store-level reminder that thou shalt not save (unless, out of the goodness of your heart, you want to give money to banks to buy Treasuries).
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See Also:
- Government Screwing Savers, Retirees To Keep Secret Wall Street Bailout Going
- CHART OF THE DAY: America’s New Savings Habit Kills Global Trade
- January 12, 2010: THE DAY BERNANKE GOT REPLACED