Just when you thought the MNI braintrust could not be any dumber….
The Gray Lady reports that the company wants to sell off The Miami Herald in order to raise cash and pay down its debt. That would be a newspaper in the same cratered South Florida market that is producing next to nothing in revenue.
Better still, MNI thinks that buyers will be interested not in the paper so much as the real estate it occupies. That real estate would be in the very same cratered South Florida real estate market. And MNI reporters and editors should be terrified that corporate actually thinks that selling a metro daily not for its news organization but for its square footage is great idea. This is a recipe for the mass shuttering of dailies across the country.
A coherent survival strategy would involve, yes, shedding the company’s high-dollar, high-prestige real estate but by moving operations to office park nerdistans where they belong. Then, you keep the news organizations intact as much as possible while selling off careerbuilder.com and other electronic mass market properties which will never be greater in value and are destined to be overtaken by social networking operations.
Instead, McClatchy is telling the world it is indifferent to the continued operation of newspapers while angling for a short-term infusion of cash that will not remotely change the company’s prospects for demise in 2010. Great plan.
Bonus Observation: It could not possibly be that MNI actually thinks the “prestige” of the Herald will smoke out buyers, could it? If so, they must be looking for ownership from Latin America. And that would be another one of our predictions coming true.
