Journal Register Co. files for bankruptcy - again

Well said LTL. Paton is pathetic.

 

Sorry for everyone who works there.

What is a "stalking horse" bid that John Paton referred to?

And what papers does JRC own? I thought Providence was the biggest paper. What are the others?

 

The Providence Journal is owned by A.H. Belo Corporation.

The Journal Register Company's top newspapers, by circulation: New Haven (Conn.) Register, The Oakland (Mich.) Press, Delaware County (Pa.) Daily, The Macomb (Mich.) Daily and The (Willoughby, Ohio) News-Herald.

 

The Trentonian of "Roasted Nuts" fame is one of the flagship dailies. The Saratogian (N.Y.) and the Mount Pleasant Morning Sun (Mich.) are among the others.

Oh, and LTL - you hit the nail on the head. Eff John Paton and the horse he rode in on.

 

JRC used to own a chain of papers in Rhode Island, I believe, but then sold to another company. (There are some others on this board that definitely know about this better than I do.)

 

How has BYH not posted here...

 

Gosh I'm fucking shocked. It seemed like such a safe, revolutionary place to work.

*whistles and walks away*

 

Sooooo are we talking about private equity or hedge funds? They are discrete.

People generally won't invest money in a derivative parasite. It's pretty easy to do that kind of thing, hence you don't get the returns you get from actually investing in a good, successful business. Yes, there CAN be money made by buying and dismantling companies, but there is money in selling scrap steel. It doesn't compare to the money made in making and selling new implements.

To succeed in PE, you need to consistently "buy and build" companies. Yes, it's leveraged. Your house is leveraged. Your car is leveraged. There is a reason why.

 

My bad on mixing PE and hedge fund, although sometimes a company is owned by one and sometimes it is the other.

However, regarding the PE "buy and build" strategy, you're thinking of old private equity. Around 2000 or so they hit on this new tactic of taking their special dividends, and that really changed the equation. The company being bought no longer has to be successful for the private equity company to make money. There was a great New Yorker article on this a few months back that I've quoted repeatedly, but basically "special dividends" were very rare before the last decade.

Having already piled companies high with debt in order to buy them, many private-equity funds had their companies borrow even more, and then used that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends.” This allowed them to recoup their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake. Before 2000, big special dividends were not that common. But between 2003 and 2007 private-equity funds took more than seventy billion dollars out of their companies. These dividends created no economic value—they just redistributed money from the company to the private-equity investors.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/01/30/120130ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2653RQgu1

 

I worked for a JRC paper in 2010. I'm not shocked at all.

 

They make a deal with a particular company to make a minimum bid in return for a breakup fee if another bidder wins the auction. That way, they avoid being sold to a lowball bidder.

 

How did the open source experiment turn out?