I’m sure there were some glasses raised on New Year’s Eve by our friends over at the DMN. And the Dec 31-to-Dec 31 measure doesn’t include the March low point of $.59, which would make its rebound up 1000% (the stock today is up to $6.00).
The conventional thinking that newspapers are dead (“My kids don’t read newspapers.” Ahem. When did kids ever read newspapers?) may need some revision. Here’s newspaper critic Allen Muter:
The average rise in publishing shares last year was 8.5 times better than the performance of the stock market as a whole. If you back out the total loss in value of the two publicly held publishers that went bankrupt in 2009, the shares of the surviving companies increased by an average of 200.6%.
The talk is about tech. It always will be. Tech is exciting and new (Android! Tablet! Nexus One!). But print performs. Forget the news. I say again, the newspaper is the single most effective delivery system ever devised, especially for printed coupons — the mainstay of American consumer commerce.
