Filed under: Newspapers, Marketing and advertising, Tribune Co. (TRB), News Corp’B’ (NWS)

To the surprise of no one, the newly private Tribune Co. is probably going to sell Newsday. The once-venerable New York paper, like all metro dailies, has fallen on hard times and Tribune’s new CEO and owner Sam Zell has got a mountain of debt to pay down.

According to The Wall Street Journal . Long Island-based Cablevision Systems Corp. (NYSE: CVC) and New York’s Daily News as potential buyers. Rupert Murdoch probably would love to buy Newsday and combine it with News Corp’s (NYSE: NWS) New York Post, but I’m not sure whether the antitrust regulators would grant it. He is trying to merge everything but the editorial staffs of the Post — never a hugely profitable enterprise — with Newsday to save money in a joint operating agreement, the Journal states.

After spending $5 billion for Dow Jones, Murdoch needs to pick all of the low-hanging fruit he has the ability to. I anticipate this deal to happen. Maybe it will lead to others for papers that buyers are eager to unload. Perhaps, Murdoch might buy other Tribune papers from Zell such as The Baltimore Sun or Los Angeles Times. As the Australian tycoon showed in chasing Dow Jones, influence matters as much to him as profits. Gaining more massive papers furthers that goal at the expense of shareholders.

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, Best Buy (BBY)

When Toshiba announced over a month ago that it would cease making and marketing HD DVD players, all the retailers that sold those types of players and associated movies in the HD DVD format had pretty much already announced that they’d started scaling down HD DVD inventory. To early adopter consumers who had already purchased expensive HD DVD players, this was the price of admission: not knowing whether that format or the competing Blu-ray format would win.

HD DVD eventually bit the dust, and for consumers who purchased HD DVD equipment at Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY), the taste was probably quite sour. As in, “what do I do with this $300 player now?” Following competitor Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC), Best Buy is now helping consumers with the frustration. Instead of giving customers a complete credit for the purchase of an HD DVD player like Circuit City is doing (if bought in the last 90 days), Ideal Purchase is doing something less interesting but with more oomph — as in, free $50 gift cards.

This will cost Best Purchase an estimated $10 million, and by many accounts it’s worth each penny. The move has been classified as “brilliant” from just about every corner I have the ability to find. The reason? It will bring foot traffic into stores (that’s half the battle of retail) while building loyalty to those consumers that HD DVD left in the cold. In other words “Best Purchase cares,” in a manner of talking. And, no action is required; the cards will be mailed out proactively to those customers Best Purchase has identified as having purchased an HD DVD player. Talk about a major marketing campaign here. And, from my perspective, this is actually better than just giving a full refund to customers who ask (ala, Circuit City). Again, it seems that Ideal Purchase has an innovative angle here that should continue making it the first destination for consumer electronics buys among the electronics early adopter crowd.

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Filed under: Windows, Office, Productivity, Freeware

Cayra is a mind mapping and concept-planning application for Windows that lets you create graphical representations of thought processes and ideas like brainstorms, family trees, and product-release schedules.

The program lets you label link paths and change the colors of links and nodes. You can also add images, hyperlinks, dates, and yes/no fields to nodes. FreeMind and MindManager file imports are supported.

The Cayra team is working on a web-based Flash version of their product that can be used on any platform and will support map exchanging. The current Windows version requires .NET framework 3.0.

For mind mapping on Mac OS X, try MindNode.

[Thanks commenter upsilamba!]

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Filed under: Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Time Warner Cable (TWC), Chasing Value

If you are a longtime shareholder of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), you are very patient indeed. You can count me among you, and you can count a thousand times we’ve had carrots dangled in front of us that gave us hope we would see some nice gains in our shares.

I am pondering why I am still hanging on. My cost basis was $12.10 and we sold half our shares in the low $20’s amid the flurry of news about Carl Icahn buying back shares and breaking up the company. I sold some stock and he sold some stock, I kept some shares and he kept some shares. Mine are of little consequence except to me. His are of the utmost importance to everyone.

As long as Carl still has some hope, should we? TWX is trading around $14 these days. This is a story of a company going nowhere fast. It has been improving AOL over the past few years and the site is very good in my estimation. But that does not seem to be producing much growth.

As AOL improves, so do the competitors and to a large part the status quo continues. From my perspective, the Web business is just a spending game where the stakes keep increasing but the rewards are not always tangible. (Disclosure: AOL is the mothership for BloggingStocks.com which by many metrics has been very successful, but our success has limited impact on AOL’s overall revenue).

The cable division is larger now after completing the acquisition of Adelphia Communications, but this has not produced the intended results either. TWX is a major player in cable — for now, that’s a large so what?

Warner Brothers Studios has had some massive hits, including the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise which released its third motion picture in the series last year to great enthusiasm. The problem is that the motion picture business is hit or miss. Fewer photos are getting made, the stakes are ever increasing, and the industry has not been pegged for major growth for a decade.

The magazine business has been pegged for negative growth with the advent of the World wide web. Based on what I pay for most of my subscriptions, I think that they’re just covering the printing and shipping costs, and like so many of their enterprises, are 99% advertising dependent. They’ve sold off many titles and streamlined the business. This is true of nearly all the Time Warner divisions.

Time Warner has done a lot of clean-up. New CEO Jeff Bewkes has been a leader in this regard and continues to seek constant mission improvement from everything I can see. But that does not mean there will be strong revenue growth if the economy continues to weaken.

Look at it this way: If you are a teacher or a construction worker, no matter how hard you work and how good a job you do, you will only earn so much money. If you are an investment banker, bond trader or hedge fund manager, you can get a million dollar bonus in a year that you and the company (and shareholders) were losers. Perhaps just a smaller bonus. Bewkes and his team can play the hand they were dealt perfectly and still not win anything.

By that measure I agree with Carl Icahn that Time Warner needs to be split up by creating independent operating companies. Notice I did not state sold off, even though if I was on the inside I would certainly look at all the options.

I have thought for a long time that TWX is a conglomerate with many entities that don’t have to be united, and derive little of the promised synergies. I would prefer they change the model and spin out all of the divisions and make TWX a holding company, each division to sink or swim on it’s own.

If you own Time Warner, you own a media index fund, and it has been performing like one. It will probably be a safe place for your money, but unless it changes the model, I do not have much faith left that it will make you a lot of money in the near future.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the design and research principal for an architecture and planning firm. He writes Chasing Value and Serious Money columns. Disclosure: I’m a shareholder in TWX.

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Filed under: Marketing and advertising, Walt Disney (DIS), Media World

My wife the soap opera fan is thrilled that Warren Buffett is slated to appear on ABC’s “All My Children” soap opera. I’m appalled.

For one thing, she’s informed me that if soaps are good enough for the world’s richest man that I’ve no excuse for fleeing the family room in horror whenever she’s watching her shows. I guess my sarcastic remarks about the genre are out of the question too.

Buffett, though, is rich enough to do what he wants when he wants. And according to Reuters, the Oracle of Omaha is crazy about soaps. He’s good friends with series creator Agnes Nixon and even appeared on the program in 1992.

“Buffett’s part is being written into a story line of the show involving the character Erica Kane, the vixen entrepreneur and self-styled media mogul played by series veteran Susan Lucci,” Reuters states. “Lucci’s character recently pleaded guilty to insider trading — a crime she unintentionally committed — but ended up a fugitive when another convict she was handcuffed to escaped en route to prison.”

Buffett, who will enter the picture during May’s sweeps, enters the picture after Erica’s capture and is called upon to help her by a mutual friend named Opal, the news service says, adding the outcome isn’t what the soap opera icon expected.

You have to hand it to Buffett for not taking himself too seriously. Billionaires usually cause soap operas and don’t need to perform in them. Can you imagine Bill Gates hamming it up or Steve Jobs?

–Freelance writer Jonathan Berr edits the blog Ketchup and Eggs

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