Companies

Many years ago, a veteran editor at what was then the Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times made the following observation about that family and its dividends from this newspaper: "They're either rolling in it, or they're really rolling in it. And when they're only rolling in it, they start to panic." The era when insufficiently huge newspaper profits would give the shivers only to the members of a...

As Florida money manager Bruce S. Sherman presses his campaign for a sale of Knight Ridder Inc., he and other principals of his firm could collect a $300 million bonanza this summer -- depending on how things shake out. Mr. Sherman, chief executive of Legg Mason Inc.'s Private Capital Management LP, shook up the newspaper industry three weeks ago with a letter to Knight Ridder's board, urging it...

The question is: Do Americans really want to live in a world without newspapers? If you're reading this, chances are good you don't. Yet almost daily we read reports of more buyouts and budget cuts at America's papers owing to fewer readers. Newsrooms, now cubicled and corporatized, have become the morgues they so closely resemble, filled with ghosts of the departed and those who await the next ax...

Through a series of clever acquisitions and in-house creations, Yahoo Inc. has transformed itself from a dot-com survivor into a Web 2.0 powerhouse driven by blogs, podcasts and other forms of user-generated social media. The 10-year-old company is staying true to its search engine roots, but with the aggressive embrace of new technologies–from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to contextual tagging...

CHICAGO (November 22, 2005) -- A couple of days after Private Capital Management LP (PCM) CEO Bruce Sherman rocked Knight Ridder and the rest of the newspaper industry with a saber-rattling letter demanding the nation's second-largest newspaper company put itself on the auction block, the influential Wall Street Journal "Heard on the Street" column led off with a rather remarkable statement...

DOHA, Qatar, Nov. 21 (UPI) -- Al Jazeera, which is relentless in reporting U.S. involvement in Iraq and other major stories, has so far been less forthcoming about a legal dispute involving its own Web site. An Al-Jazeera executive told United Press International Saturday the case is ongoing, but confirmed the story so far leaves two news Web sites with the same domain name -- and only one belongs...

NEW YORK: Next to feel the knife in the current round of Tribune Co. job cuts -- which in recent days have already hit papers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Orlando and Hartford -- will be Newsday in Melville, N.Y. A memo written Friday by Publisher Timothy P. Knight and posted today at the Romenesko Web site at www.poynter.org saves the worst for last, revealing that "as we move through the...

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is bracing up for a battle meant to oust Time Warner chief executive Richard Parsons. Icahn is scripting a proxy fight at Time Warner Inc's annual meeting next year to replace "some or all" of the directors and to seek the "ouster" of Parsons, according to a BusinessWeek report. ON THE FRONT FOOT: Carl Icahn Icahn, better known as a corporate raider turned...

More than 60 former journalists of the Knight Ridder group have volunteered to nominate candidates for the Knight Ridder board to reassert John Knight’s creed. In a widely-circulated "Open Letter from Knight Ridder Alumni", they said they would not remain silent anymore, and would support and counsel only corporate leadership that restores to Knight Ridder newspapers the resources to do excellent...

NEW YORK -- The newspaper business is getting smaller. On Wednesday, five newspapers owned by Tribune Co. announced job cuts, but they're hardly alone. In recent weeks, no fewer than nine other well-known newspapers all announced cuts in payrolls or other expenses. What's happening? Here are some questions and answers about the challenges facing the U.S. newspaper business. Q. I keep hearing about...