Saturday, April 5, 2008

Bankruptcy for the Journal Register Co.?

If the [Journal Register] company were to seek bankruptcy protection, as analysts said was possible, it would be a first in recent memory for a publicly traded newspaper company, John Morton, a longtime newspaper analyst, said.

“That will just add to the gloom and doom that has settled over the industry,” he said.

Journal Register owns 22 daily newspapers and 310 nondailies, mostly clustered in to six areas: Greater Philadelphia, Michigan, Connecticut, Greater Cleveland and the mid-Hudson region of New York. The company, based in Yardley, Pa., went public in 1997, and was once owned by the New York investment firm E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company. The company’s shares closed unchanged Friday at 52 cents.

“Who would have thought that a relatively substantial public newspaper company would be at risk of bankruptcy?” [Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute,] said. “People are going to see this and say, who’s next?” [Click for MORE]

> Journal Register Co. could be delisted from NYSE
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