The Vote in Iraq

John Burns provides a typically excellent "interactive report" on the voting in Iraq. Click here, today, December 16th. If you come to this site after December 16th, I think you'll probably need to hunt the Burns report down. It is well worth the effort.

Another View of the Knight Ridder Sale

My friend Mr. M emails as follows:


....I am not sure I totally agree with (your column on Knight Ridder). In fact, I think there is a certain amount of remaining value in Knight Ridder -- and the rest of the dinosaur newspapers.

KR throws off about $700MM in cash. Aggressively, one could probably take out about $300MM in costs, primarily in sales & admin, but also in layers and layers of editors and reporters who cover the same thing over and over, so you could probably remain with a company that throws off about $1B in cash, for at least a few more years. On top of that, the web sites leverage actually good brands, Miami Herald, Inquirer, etc. that could probably be organized into a growth business that will be successful, though they won't be yahoo.

I am actually surprised that the private equity folks aren't taking a more solid look at KRI.
Even if one assumes the business declines at 10% per year, one could create about 8-10B of value which would more than make today's shareholders ($4.B) and today's bond holder ($2B) happy and leave a little something for the risk taker.

Ellisblog Back!


Out of the blue, a man named Tunku asked me to write a short piece about Knight Ridder. So I did.

Postscript: A couple of readers emailed to ask: "did you realize that the AP is a not-for-profit co-operative owned by its member papers?" The answer is yes, I did. Thus its www.ap.org URL.

The fact that it now exists as a not-for-profit co-operative owned by its member papers does not mean that it must continue to exist as such. It can be reconfigured. That's what investment bankers and $1000-an-hour New York lawyers do. They reconfigure things! And the pressure is on the AP board to perform, to say the least. One way they might perform is to sell it to Google at 2x or 3x revenues.

Had I had more words to work with (the WSJ gave me a word count of 600), I would have addressed this issue in detail. But I didn't, so I didn't.

Things That Make You go "Wow."


If you do nothing else this summer, do this:

1. Click on http://earth.google.com/.

2. Download the software.

3. Click on the desktop icon that says "Google Earth."

4. And think about what it means in say, 25 years.

Yvedt Matory

There will be a memorial service for Yvedt Matory at the Memorial Church of Harvard University, Cambridge MA on May 26th at 11:00AM .

Yvedt Matory.

Yvedt Matory died yesterday of cancer. A leading cancer surgeon in Boston, mother of three children, wife to Harvard Law School Professor Randy Kennedy and maybe the best neighbor one could ever have, she was a gift to everyone who knew her. Funeral arrangements will be announced shortly and posted here.

Update: Yvedt's funeral will be held at The National Cathedral in Washington, DC (where she and Randy were married) on Wednesday, 20 April, at 1:30pm. There will also be a memorial service in Boston down the road.

Book Recommendations.

Joe Kanon's latest is out. It's called Alibi and it's a great read. Disney War by James Stewart is the best business book I've read in a long, long time. I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe was widely panned. Turns out it's a great read.

Coming soon will be George Peper's new book entitled The Secret of Golf. George used to edit Golf magazine and has always been the best guy on golf around. I'll blog it after I read it.

500 Weblogs

How much are 500 weblogs worth? $410 million! Or $820,000.00 per weblog! How do I know this? Because that's what the New York Times paid Prime Media (KKR) for About.com. You can't make this stuff up.

Here's some (mostly) positive comment, including the NYT press release. In fact, the deal is an embarrassment of overpayment and reveals a kind of strategic ennui. The "metro" strategy of marketing the newspaper has failed. The television strategy has failed. The great Internet opportunity of 2000-2001 has long since passed (the NYT company could have acquired Yahoo! for a relative song in 2001). Having failed to even comprehend the turbo-dynamics of Blogger, the NYT Company now throws $410 million at 500 weblogs.

It is a company adrift. At some point, institutional shareholders are going to start abandoning ship.

A Great Day

You gotta believe. President Bush's statement of congratulations to the people of Iraq can be read here.

Robert F. Kennedy Speech on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death

April 4, 1968, Indianapolis, Indiana

I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.

In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence their evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization -- black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rathe difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate to ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.