The big news of the day is that Knight Ridder Company is being sold for $4.5 billion to the McClatchy Company.
KRC, not to be confused a spurious take on ultrafine KFC, has about 32 dailies in 29 markets, with a daily circulation of 3.3 million. If you discount all the internet holdings in properties like Career Builder, the value of the deal is about $1400 per subscriber. That is still way higher than any deal for web property in recent times. Internet advertising boom or not, dead trees still are expensive…. very expensive. I guess there is still no place for Macy’s to put advertisements for its unending sales.
Related to this subject, this might be a good read…
“The State of the News Media 2006 is the third in our annual effort to provide a comprehensive look each year at the state of American journalism.”
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/index.asp
From memory KR tried to get into electonic media before the web took off, trying to get brokers and financial institutions to subscribe … funnily enough they decided it was a bad idea and went back to their paper only model. I guess it paid off for them!