Last month, the New York Times outed retailer JCPenney for engaging in “black hat optimization” — the practice of buying or placing links designed primarily to improve a site’s standing in Google search results.
While JCPenney did a quick mea culpa and fired the SEO consultants responsible for the links (and had its search standings plummet for all the keywords involved), there is also a flip side to the story: a cautionary tale for news sites and bloggers — indeed, for anyone operating a reputable website that looks for advertising revenue.
A number of high-profile news sites, in fact, still carry links of the offending variety, potentially to the detriment of their own standing in Google search results. In a survey last week, we identified a variety of news sites publishing paid links that lack Google-required HTML formatting designed to avoid negative SEO results. The list includes GlobalPost (which has since removed the links), the Jerusalem Post, the Christian Science Monitor, The Monthly (of Australia), the Gotham Gazette (which has since made them Google-compliant by adding nofollow tags — see below), the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail and its JOA partner the Charleston Gazette.
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry
Who owns America’s newspapers?
In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status.
After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’s common stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.
First, here’s a set of slides detailing the top investors in each of the publicly-owned newspaper publishers. I’ve included among these News Corporation (both the class A and class B common stock), but for the rest of this analysis, News Corp. is excluded because its global multimedia holdings in film, television, magazines and book dwarf the entire rest of the American newspaper business. (Note: All holding and valuations throughout this post are as of December 31, 2010.)
Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
In January, I detailed how a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital, which played a role in the shakeup at MediaNews Group, also had significant holdings in newspaper groups Freedom Communications, Philadelphia Newspaper Holdings, Journal Register Company, Tribune, and the Canadian newspaper firm Postmedia Network — all firms with current or recent bankruptcy status.
After noticing that Alden also owned, as of December 31, 3.91 percent of Gannett’s common stock, I surveyed all of the U.S. public newspaper companies to see whether Alden pops up elsewhere as well. It turns out that, other than Alden’s stake in Gannett, there’s little crossover between the principal investors in the public companies and those that have picked up the “distressed opportunities” created by trips through bankruptcy court.
First, here’s a set of slides detailing the top investors in each of the publicly-owned newspaper publishers. I’ve included among these News Corporation (both the class A and class B common stock), but for the rest of this analysis, News Corp. is excluded because its global multimedia holdings in film, television, magazines and book dwarf the entire rest of the American newspaper business. (Note: All holding and valuations throughout this post are as of December 31, 2010.)
Continue reading this post at Nieman Journalism Lab.
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