The Chapter 11 filing of MediaNews holding company Allied Media has launched the newsroom of the Palo Alto Weekly into operation. The Weekly competes with the Mercury News and the Daily News (formerly based in Palo Alto but now located in Menlo Park), both owned by MediaNews.
- … MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton told the Wall Street Journal that the banks assuming an 80 percent interest in the company will insist on further consolidations and improved profitability. He thus signaled that continued cost-cutting is likely, but declined to be more specific about consolidations other than to tell people to “look at the map.”
- … While it is likely that the banks taking over MediaNews will seek to sell their interest to others as soon as they can, the low current values of publicly traded media companies suggest that will be difficult.
- Federal law gives banks up to five years to divest themselves of companies acquired through bankruptcy or due to collateral provisions in loan agreements.
- Unfortunately, the Mercury News did its readers a disservice by its buried and incomplete coverage of its own restructuring. In doing so, it ironically demonstrated the hazards of media organizations being owned by large corporate parents.
Other stories in the Palo Alto Weekly about the MediaNews Chapter 11 filing include: