»
The company that owns The Weather Channel, Landmark Communications, is considering putting the channel up for sale. Landmark is also disposing itself of its print assets, which include The Virginian-Pilot, The Roanoke Times, and the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record.
The sale of The Weather Channel could draw interest from rivals NBC and News Corp., as well as from Comcast, and could fetch as much as $5 billion, writes the Financial Times.
The announcement of a possible sale is a sign that the credit squeeze has not entirely killed confidence among chief executives that they can get reasonable valuations for their assets, provided they are attractive to strategic buyers.
Whether The Weather Channel is worth $5 billion is up for debate. The channel can be found in 96 million homes; the potential price tag is more than five times what NBC recently paid for Oxygen Media, which is in 74 million homes, the New York Post points out.
Landmark, which made $2 billion last year, won’t say how much the Weather properties contributed to that, but its classified ad business alone brought in $850 million, according to BreakingViews.com.
Doing some calculations based on results from Yahoo and cable conglomerate Discovery Holding, Breakingviews argues (via The New York Times) that the $5 billion price-tag would be 20 times more than the Weather properties earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization - well above Yahoo’s and more than twice Discovery’s.
The Spanish Radio Association says Arbitron still has not addressed its concerns and research questions regarding the PPM and how “Hispanics are recruited and represented, and how the PPM panel is maintained.”
The SRA has been working with Arbitron in…
The Chicago Tribune’s new design will launch on Sept. 29, Tribune Co. chief operating officer Randy Michaels says. No details on the redesign have been released; the paper has already been decreasing its editorial pages to create a more even split…
Teens are not the best demo to target with cell phone advertising, according to a new study from comScore. Though they are cell phone-savvy, most of them - 70 percent - have their phones paid for by parents, which means…
CNN won its second night of coverage of the Democratic National Convention Tuesday. The network averaged 3.41 million viewers in the 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. time slot, despite the fact that Fox drew nearly even for the night.
Fox…
Generation Y is the most self-indulgent, Generation X is the most innovative, and Boomers are the most productive, while the “Silent Generation” and the “Greatest Generation” are the most admired, according to a recent survey by Harris Interactive, writes MarketingCharts.
Conducted for…
To encourage shoppers to buy more back-to-school items, retailers often implement “loss leader” strategies: that is, selling items at a loss or even giving them away in hopes that the reductions will attract shoppers who will then buy other, more…
