U-T San Diego buying North County Times, or maybe not

By the way, since it wasn't posted here:

RIP, NCT.

A bunch of good deskers worked their final shifts in the Escondido newsroom last week, and the few remaining survivors have been relocated to the U-T's Mission Valley office. The Escondido office is now a bureau of the U-T.

Beginning Sunday, the NCT's print edition has been shrunken into a local wrap for the U-T's North County edition. All pages are designed in Mission Valley.

There is now one print newspaper on the racks in northern San Diego County.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/morning-report/article_cadf2044-171e-11e2-9973-0019bb2963f4.html

 

Shit, sorry to hear that. I always liked that scrappy paper, which I thought did a good job serving its niche market.

 

Crap. Only time I was in San Diego (2002) I thought NCT was a pretty damn good operation.

 

And the UT sells the NCT building for a cool $7 million, meaning the paper was worth about $5 million.

 

This is the cruel math which I think is going to doom a lot of other newspapers.

Manchester bought the NCT for $5M, net of the sale of the builing. The NCT had a circulation of what, 65K and the U-T, 200K? So combined circulation is 265K. And I believe that the U-T home delivery service largely overlapped the NCT. So the U-T combines the papers and raises the monthly home circulation rate by $3 a month. And combined circulation drops by a 25% as a result, or down to 200K. But the circulation revenue from the increased price is 600K a month, or 7M a year. So the U-T recoups it's investment in a year. And that does not count the U-T picking up additional advertising recenue from the combined website or local print advertisers.

I think that as long as newspapers sell for little more than the value of thier real estate the economics outlined above will doom more papers.

 

And Peggy Chapman leaving Lee and (HanSen land as interim publisher) at the end of November to do HR for a San Diego company.

 

I like what they have done because they post UT stories on NCTimes.com and I don't need a subscription.

But any news on how everything is going on over there?? I read people in sports are going to be or have been let go. Any news on who's leaving and if they will only use UT staff for pro beats?

 

Glad you like it. People lost their jobs for that.

Yes, they're only using UT writers for pro beats now.

Here's the only tweet from @NCTPadres since October 1:

http://twitter.com/NCTPadres/status/261226450743599105

@NCTChargers doesn't exist anymore.

 

NCT Chargers writer is writing some Chargers stuff for UT.