Thoughts on the DFM sale and newspaper values

If reports are correct, my former company, Digital First Media, is going to sell to Apollo Global Management for about $400 million.

I’m not going to pretend I can analyze what that means for DFM, my many former colleagues there or for the news business. I hope for the sake of my many friends remaining in the company’s newsrooms across the country that the Apollo’s management will find a path to prosperity that doesn’t involve endlessly cutting staff. I hope the company will genuinely pursue the kind of digital creativity that the future demands and will have the staying power to let good ideas flourish.

Since seeing initial reports about the pending deal, I’ve wondered about the meaning of the $400 million sale price, reached in a long “auction” process that sought the best deal(s) to sell the company as a whole or in pieces.

The reported price tag is a breathtaking fall from what newspapers used to be worth, even in the past few years. I hope this means Apollo’s strategy isn’t to keep cutting staff to maintain profits. DFM doesn’t have much left to cut, and values have dropped as newspapers have been cutting. The best way to maximize this $400 million investment will be to build value by developing new revenue streams.

Comparisons of sales prices of media companies can be misleading. One sale might include more real estate, while another might include more debt or pension obligations. Successful subsidiaries can add value to a company. In a sale such as the DFM deal, which is essentially between two private equity companies, full terms may never be disclosed. You might not be comparing apples and oranges, but apples and lawn mowers.

I was not involved in the sale at all, other than losing my job last year as the company was preparing for the sale. But I understood DFM enough to know this was an extraordinarily complicated deal, with an array of factors that make it unique:

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Two approaches to ‘Flashbacks’ using photos from archives

This photo of an airplane fighting a 1990 fire led a Flashback photo gallery for the Hamilton Spectator on the 25th anniversary of the fire. Used with permission.

My blog post on ways to generate more value from newspaper archives drew two responses about newsrooms using old photos in projects they call Flashbacks.

Joan Walters of the Hamilton Spectator explained the first project in an email, which I’m using as a guest post, with her permission:

We’re posting Flashbacks from The Hamilton Spectator’s pool of archived photos at least twice a week – using news events (snow storms, local controversies, major anniversaries such as the recent 25^th anniversary of the Hagersville Tire Fire, which remains the biggest environmental disaster in Ontario history).

The focus for us is to relate the Flashback material directly to our website, thespec.com. We don’t post archive photos unless we can relate the post somehow to thespec.com with story links to the web at the top of each blog post.

A  simple example is Jon Wells’ long read on the weekend about The Way we Shopped, which carried only a handful of  available photos on the website. So we cross-linked the web story to the Flashback blog post, where the link to Jon’s story was also placed.

We have an Omniture tag on the Flashback blog to make sure we benefit from traffic, which has been good.

When we post on Flashback and it’s not directly related to a current story, we place a click-through to the blog on our website carousel, using the best photo.

High levels of commenting on some of the posts teaches us what’s popular, what works, and what doesn’t.

For instance, a post on a long-gone ski hill and winter sports park soared during a local controversy over banning sledding and readers went crazy over a simple I Remember post on a popular restaurant-motel.

It’s early days yet but it’s working for us.

The other Flashback example came in a tweet, so it didn’t offer as much detail:

@stevebuttry@mkramer Nice article on value of archives for legacy news orgs. Here’s what we’re doing @MiamiHerald : http://t.co/7lbfBqQZIa

— Amy Driscoll (@DriscollAmy) February 23, 2015

The Herald’s Flashback feature mostly features galleries on topics relating to Miami culture — such as South Beach and beauty pageants — but also looks back on incidents in Miami history — such as a visit from Winston Churchill and another historic fire.

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Another Twitter expert who didn’t bother to learn

I have long been an admirer of Edward Wasserman’s work. When I was presenting a series of ethics seminars, Our Readers Are Watching, for the American Press Institute, I frequently recommended Wasserman’s Miami Herald columns on ethics in a list-serv for participants.

But his latest work shows how smart people can write stupid things when they don’t take the time to learn and understand the topic they are writing about. Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, clearly is smart. His thumbnail bio with his columns says he was educated at Yale, the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.

Apparently that meant Wasserman was so educated he didn’t have to learn anything first-hand about Twitter before writing about it. His latest column, How Twitter poses a threat to newspapers, revealed so much ignorance about Twitter that I knew without looking that he had never bothered to use Twitter. But I look anyway. It’s good journalism to do some research and see if your assumptions are correct. A quick check using Twitter’s “find people” function showed no Edward Wasserman on Twitter. (Update: Wasserman confirmed in an email response that he has not used Twitter. His response, which shows a refreshing humility and thick skin, is in the comments.)

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