LATEST:P-T CEO’S FIRECRACKER MEMO IS A DUD WITH EMPLOYEES
It’s Independence Day, and the man who owns the Press-Telegram piggybacked the holiday to send employees a Fourth of July Eve memo full of gung-ho slogans and exclamation points, which is about as close as you can come to fireworks in print. But the upshot was shellshock: the three-page memo left most employees with the unsettling feeling that they may soon be a lot more independent than they want to be. The P-T worker who e-mailed the memo to The District slugged it: “MediaNewsObit.”
MediaNews Group, Inc., is the Denver-based corporation that owns Long Beach’s local daily, and it’s in big financial trouble-the result of the ravenous accumulation of newspapers across the country that used what prominent investment banker Mark Young calls “a strategy with an investment thesis that was clearly flawed.” That is, CEO Dean Singleton borrowed against company assets during a time when those assets were losing value. Now the debts are coming due and there may not be enough money to pay. That’s not good.
