Cramer Pans Newspapers

On today’s WALL STREET CONFIDENTIAL video on TheStreet.com, Cramer talked Gannett’s (GCI) story about advertising not being that great.  Cramer noted the circulation is actually not going down that much, but the advertising money is not staying the same in papers because advertisers are not reaching the target audience in papers that they want.  Newspapers are not the means that people get their information anymore.  This is not a growth business anymore and Cramer said it is "not a business" by his definition.  He thinks they could fire everyone.  NYT has a $500M newsroom and maybe they could make it a $100 million newsroon, and you can hear what Cramer calls their journalism.  Cramer said it can all be done on the web now.  He wants out of Gannett (GCI) and New York Times (NYT).  If you look at NYT they are not down as much because they do have more online presence and more online efforts than most other newspaper operators.

As far as Blackstone going public, Cramer said this is their ability to gouge and this is the maximum Bamboozling of this.  He congratulates it.

Many other newspaper companies are down as well, even though they weren’t mentioned:
Tribune (TRB) -2%, McClatchy (MNI) -2.8%, Belo (BLC) -1%, and Lee Enterprises (LEE) -1.3%.

Jon C. Ogg
March 16, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.