McClatchy's disastrous August

Remember all the plaudits this company got some years back when it was a lot smaller - and the industry was a lot healthier? Well, McClatchy now looks like everyone else, which isn’t a good thing. In California, where the company owns the Bee papers, the Merced Sun-Star and the Tribune in SLO, print ad revenue fell 18.1 percent, which is even worse than in Florida. The biggest hit throughout the chain was in classified (autos and real estate). Overall ad revenues fell 9.2 percent. CEO Gary Pruitt said he expects little improvement before the fourth quarter, but even then revenue will likely still be negative (and that’s holiday advertising time!). "But we are not accepting business on these terms - indeed we are working hard to mitigate the impact of revenue declines by exerting strong cost discipline," he said in a statement. "We are making progress on reducing debt in the third quarter and will continue to focus on de-levering our balance sheet." That's a nice sentiment, but Doug McIntyre over at 24/7 Wall Street writes that "at some point one of these newspaper companies is not going to have enough operating income to cover debt service." That means bankruptcy or asset sales. Here's the McClatchy release.