Mass
High Tech shifts focus to online, cuts 4 jobs
Mass
High Tech of Boston announced that it is cutting back its print edition
in September and merging its newsroom with a sister publication, the
Boston Business Journal. Four employees were laid off June 15 as part
of the changes.
Mass High Tech’s
online operation has experienced “enormous growth” in
recent years, Publisher Michael Olivieri said, according to the Boston
Herald.
Mass High Tech’s
weekly edition will go to an every-other-week publication. Its size
will expand to 32 pages from 24, with more shared content with Boston
Business Journal as the newsrooms merge in the fall.
Small,
medium-sized papers cost less than ever, report says
The market value of small-
and medium-sized newspapers is the lowest in the 86 years Cribb, Greene
& Associates have been tracking such value, meaning that those
papers are the least expensive they’ve been in that time for
prospective buyers.
Cribb,
Greene & Associates, a brokerage based in Bozeman, Mont., uses
EBITDA – earnings before income, taxes, depreciation and amortization
– market-value multiples based on newspapers’ 12-month
earnings. Current EBITDA multiples are “at historic lows of
4x to 8x,” or four to eight times the paper’s EBITDA,
compared to the usual market-value multiples of 10x, 12x or 14x, according
to a Cribb, Greene & Associates report written by John Cribb.
A multiple of 4x means
the paper’s market value is four times what it earned in the
past year before income, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The
low values were attributed to the troubled economy and declining revenues.
Low values mean that it’s
a good time to buy newspapers less expensively, Cribb noted in the
report. Newspapers’ revenue has fallen 10 to 15 percent on average,
compared to other industries that are experiencing heavier losses,
such as 25 percent in the retail industry and 40 percent in real estate
or autos, according to Cribb’s report. That means that newspapers
could still rebound, because their decline has not been as steep as
other industries, according to Cribb.
He said the local demand
for newspapers was a good sign for the future of the industry, too.
“The industry may
not have hit the bottom in revenue decline, but it appears it may
be getting close,” Cribb wrote in the report. “Certainly
these are ugly numbers compared to what newspapers are used to, but
they are not disastrous.”
With multiples
of 4x, 6x and 8x, buyers can get more for their money than when EBITDA
values go back to their pre-recession values levels of 10x, 12x or
14x, the report said.
Online
newspaper archive expands to 22 states
The National Digital Newspaper
Program added seven more states June 16 to its online digital newspaper
archive, bringing its collection to 1 million newspaper pages compiled
from newspapers in 22 states.
The searchable database
was begun two years ago.
The most recent addition
includes newspaper content from Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana,
Oklahoma, Oregon and South Carolina.
The online archive, called
Chronicling America, is paid for by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Library of Congress. It features original newspapers
preserved digitally on the government-financed Web site chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
Although only certain years
and newspapers are represented, the National Digital Newspaper Program
continues to add to the Web site, selecting “historically significant”
papers from 1880 to 1922 with help from universities and historical
societies, according to The Associated Press.
States are added as institutions
from those states apply to be part of the program.
The goal is to eventually
post 20 million pages of newspapers from that time period, according
to The Washington Post.
The other participating
states are California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri,
Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah and Virginia, and the District of
Columbia.
The items above were
written, at least in part, from published reports by Jen Slothower,
a graduate student at the Northeastern University School of Journalism
and a news staff coordinator for the Bulletin.
