More on the possible sale of The Virginian-Pilot
Bill Burke and Phil Walzer of The Virginian-Pilot report:
The decision to market Landmark Communications Inc. – parent of The Virginian-Pilot and employer to more than 9,000 – came down to one person: Frank Batten Jr.
Batten, who took over leadership of the family-run media company from his father in 1998, said Thursday that he first considered the idea – and then chose that course – in November. But he repeatedly refused to say why.
“It was my decision,” said Batten, 49, who controls a majority interest in the privately held company. It was approved, he said, by family members, including Frank Batten Sr., without dissension.
And so begins the Pilot’s second-day coverage of the possible sale of our paper and its various associated properties, including what a source in The New York Times referred to today as “beachfront property”: The Weather Channel.
Frank seems like a very nice guy. He doesn’t speak much. And despite the suit you see him wearing in the uncredited staff photo above, he usually wears a golf-type knit shirt and Dockers-like slacks.
In fact, if you ran into him on the elevator, you’d never know he was a CEO. That’s where I chatted with him two or three times, when I was new here, before someone pointed out with whom I was chatting with.
Gulp!
Back to Burke and Walzer’s story…
Just because investment firms have been hired doesn’t mean Landmark will definitely be broken up and sold, they report. But if it does happen, it could happen as early as summer.
The announcement, coming during a depressed period for the newspaper industry, confounded some media researchers. But John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst and president of Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md., said the Battens might have chosen to act before profit margins erode further.
Frank Daniels Jr., a former newspaper publisher and former member of Landmark’s board, also said this could be a good time to sell Landmark, which he described as a “very well-run company.”
“I don’t see any uptick in the future” for newspaper companies, Daniels said. “The smartest thing they did,” he said of Landmark, “was continue to invest in ‘new media’ and not buy any more newspapers.”
Daniels was the publisher of The News & Observer before he sold it to McClatchy in the mid-1990s. I worked there at the time.
Come to think of it, I also worked at The Herald in Rock Hill, S.C., when that same guy — Frank Daniels Jr. — sold it to McClatchy in 1989.
Daniels sold my fat ass to McClatchy twice!
Note to McClatchy: Feel free to cut out the middleman this time. Just send me a few million bucks, directly, and we’ll call it even. You’re quite welcome.
A few points to those of you hoping to follow this story…
1) As I discovered today (Thanks, Ernie!), the links I post here can die without warning. If you can’t find a link to a story in the Pilot, just zip over to PilotOnline.com and look for it there. Please let me know so I can fix any links.
2) The mood in the newsroom today was surprisingly upbeat. No screaming, no gnashing of teeth, no folks standing in line to jump out of windows. Not to be crass or anything, but this newsroom has suffered the loss of a number of valued members who took buyouts this year. And before that, we’ve had three or four high-profile staffers die — one actually on the premises. This newsroom has been through all kinds of hell over the four years I’ve been here. The consensus today was that we’ll get through this, too.
3) I’ll update the news as often as I can. But you’ll definitely not see any major-league inside info in this blog. I’m not the world’s brightest bulb, but I’d like to think I’m smarter than that.
One more personal — and lighter — note…
When I posted the news to this blog last night — around 11:15 p.m., just after the Pilot broke the news at its web site — I hunted and hunted for a photo of the Pilot’s main building at 150 West Brambleton in Norfolk. But I couldn’t find squat.
So I took my camera to work with me this morning. As I walked over from the parking deck, I snapped off a few shots and added them to my Thursday night post.
Then, it occurred to me that if I couldn’t find good, current, convenient photos of our building, perhaps our online crew couldn’t either. So I offered them to our online coordinator, Kerry Sipe. Who added them to our brief slide show at PilotOnline.com:
As a result, I will now proudly add professional photographer to my resumé.
