Pity poor Alice Rogoff, the one-time owner of the Anchorage Daily News cum Alaska Dispatch News cum Anchorage Daily News all over again after she bankrupt her dream of being an Alaska-influencing publisher.
The whole company’s market cap on Friday was down to $27 million – $7 million less than Rogoff paid for but one of its then approximately 30 newspapers. Market cap, formally known as market capitalization is, as the financial website The Motley Fool observes, “the total market value of a company’s outstanding shares of stock.”
Theoretically, one could at this moment buy up all of the McClatchy stock for that price, although the market itself makes that difficult. A run on the stock by a buyer would surely drive up the stock price and boost the cost.
Still, you might be able to sweep it up for less than the $34 million Rogoff paid for the ADN, a tiny piece of what was then a McClatchy publishing empire, and you could almost surely get it for the $34 million plus the $23 million Rogoff lost in less than three years at the ADN, not to mention the undisclosed millions she’s now spent in Bankruptcy Court, fighting with creditors who accused her of fraud, and battling with former Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger over the $1 million she promised him but then refused to pay.
Nobody knows exactly how much money the once and now former wife of David Rubenstein, one of the country’s richest men, burned through in Alaska, but it is quite possibly twice as much as McClatchy is today worth on paper.
It’s amazing how the earth has shifted under journalism in just five years.
Don’t do it
Some saw the disaster coming, or at least some variant of it.
“Don’t do it,” friends and financial advisers told the then-AlaskaDispatch.com owner and former Washington, D.C. socialite thirsting to buy the ADN. “All you have to do is be patient. Alaska Dispatch traffic is steadily increasing. ADN is stagnant. The company is in trouble all across the country. McClatchy is stuck with a losing hand.”
But Rogoff couldn’t wait. Her appetite was bigger than she could control, and so the owner of the news website that once proudly proclaimed “We Don’t Do Dead Trees” bought a fading newspaper.
Possibly only two people in the state thought it made any sense. Rogoff and soon to be terminated ADN editor Pat Dougherty who’d overseen the downsizing and the downsizing and the downsizing of the Daily News.
It hadn’t.
Not by a long shot.
The ADN had endured a near gale. The hurricane was still coming.
As soon as Rogoff bought the ADN, she lost the newspaper’s share of McClatchy’s national advertising revenues and the efficiency of the McClatchy-run home- and car-sales sections in the newspaper, and then she added the cost of 18 editorial employees from the staff of the Dispatch to the ADN payroll.
The water wings that had been keeping the ADN float couldn’t handle both the loss of air and the additional weight. The ADN was sinking from the start. Rogoff’s bizarre response was to add even more employees, print more news and try to make the newspaper so big and influential people would have to buy it.
Crazy as that behavior might sound now it was rooted in a question Dougherty asked just after the purchase when he was still a shell-shocked editor caught wholly off guard (information gathering was never his strong suit) by the sale of the newspaper he’d been running.
Glory
Why?
Clearly, as was to become obvious, because Rogoff wanted to be somebody. Journalism is full of people who want to be somebody. Rogoff was a leader of the pack in that regard. She was never personally interested in doing journalism, which is often unpleasant work.
You sometimes have to ask people questions that you don’t want to ask. If you want to do it right, you have to devote countless hours to research. And if you do the job well and right, you’re not likely to make many friends.
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you,” the journalist and author, Don Marquis once observed. “But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
Rogoff didn’t want that. She wanted to be loved, and she wanted to be loved for being the financial heart of journalism.
Most of all, most of everything, she wanted to be the queen of Arctic journalism, which she never understood is sort of like being the queen of nothing because interest in the Arctic is in these times low.
Some of the people are interested in the disappearing ice much of the time, and all of the people are interested in the animals threatened by climate change some of the time, but none of the people are interested in those topics much of the time.
And, in general, they just don’t give a hoot about the Arctic.
For most Americans, the Arctic is cold, far away, devoid of shopping centers, dark for half the year and, worst of all, home to no real celebrities although wilderness weirdos living on the edge of the Arctic have carved out a niche in so-called “reality TV” where oddities thrive.
Alaska should probably do more to cultivate reality TV than it does. Imagine the national sensation the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race could be next year if it pitted Vanderpump, any of the stars of Little People, and a couple of the Real Housewives of Atlanta against each other in The Last Great Race.
That sort of hook up would attract plenty of attention and nicely define where we are in the crazy, mixed-up world of entertainment, information, infotainment and journaltainment – that new form of “reporting” wherein a journalist introduces the topic of discussion and then constructs a story from the most outrageous Tweets people have made about the topic.
Given what has happened in the last five years, Rogoff was lucky to catch the very tail end of newspapers as still somewhat meaningful businesses. And for a brief, shining few moments she was somebody.
Then-President Barak Obama dined at her house and stuck his head inside her Cessna 206 float plane for a look before she so infamously mangled it in a crash. Gov. Bill Walker opened his arms to embrace her and provided an always friendly ear in which she could whisper. Foreign business leaders who thought her Alaska connections might prove useful cultivated her.
She was on top of the world in her home near the top of the world until it all came crashing down in the federal Bankruptcy Court. Dougherty took a break from fishing to appear at the hearings there and chortle about how he always knew it was going to happen.
Of course it was going to happen. Most of the old media has been on a train ride to disaster for the past five years. The McClatchy market cap at that time Rogoff bought ADN was about $552 million – 20 times what it is today.
By the time Dougherty wrote his April 2015 story with a look into the rearview mirror of the “worst of the storm being over”, the cap was down to $146.75 – less than half of what it had been a year earlier. If Rogoff had waited even a year, there is a little doubt she could have bought the ADN for a fraction of what she paid.
And if she’d just stuck with Alaska Dispatch – a news organization operating out of dirt cheap offices with an editorial staff of 18 doing the work of 34 at the Daily News (in fairness to all those then at the ADN, putting out a newspaper is way more labor intensive than producing a website) – she could have published for the rest of her life – even if steadily improving online ad sales never improved – for the $24 million she told the Bankruptcy Court she lost in her three years of ADN ownership.
Had she not made an offer for the Daily News and kept plugging away at Alaska Dispatch, it’s probable McClatchy would have come to her by now to ask what she’d be willing to give them for the newspaper, although it’s equally possible the company might have simply sold its building to GCI, the cable-TV and telecom company that bought the building from Rogoff, and abandoned its lone newspaper battling a committed competitor in far off Alaska.
McClatchy has been struggling even in markets where the company faces little competition. It earlier this year jettisoned another 450 employees at its 29 newspapers in a continuing effort to survive.
The company is still hanging on but its future looks anything but clear. It lost $27.5 million in the last quarter of 2018.
Media reporter Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute didn’t sound all that optimistic writing that “McClatchy is pursuing aggressive price increases to its print subscribers, essentially treating print as a luxury item. Predictably volume was down (by 8.6 percent daily and 7.6 percent Sunday). But revenues declined too — apparently plenty are opting not to pay the higher price, and the company likely has cut marketing of new subscriptions as well.
“Strong growth in the number of digital-only subscriptions (up 51 percent to 155,000) at McClatchy’s 30 properties didn’t translate to much of a revenue gain, suggesting the average price of all those new subscriptions is very low.”
Noting the latest job cuts, he added that “if McClatchy stays intact and tips deeper to digital it will become a much smaller company….(the CEO) declined to be drawn into speculation, when questioned, about when McClatchy might stop print editions altogether.”
Can you say, “we don’t do dead trees?”
McClatchy sort of defines the sorry state of the old media today. The company has to be thanking its lucky stars that with Rogoff’s help it got out of Anchorage with pockets full of cash before the Earthquake of 2018 make a wreck of its California-designed monument to print journalism.
Sadly the new media isn’t doing much better. The ADN is back to being a shadow of its one-time greatness, as it was for much of the time Dougherty was in control, and the few reporters there, along with the few reporters left working in the 49th state in general, are so busy chasing “news,” they don’t have time to think in a world where thinking is more important than ever.
Categories: Media
Carlyle Group finds another way to squeeze money out of a stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-mobile-homes-last-week-tonight-818978/
Yesterday the Death Cult killed nearly 300 Christians in a church in Sri Lanka. Every Democrat (Hillary, Obama, Pelosi, yadda) or “MSM” reporters couldn’t utter the word “Christian or Muslim”. They all parroted the same talking points “Easter gatherers and tourists”. When in reality it was 300 Christians slaughtered in place of worship by Muslims. See how easy that was. Haha. That right there explains the death of ADN.
Remember that for David Rubenstein, the “investment” in media in Alaska was in the buying power of “shutting down” the Alaskan Dispatch…not building a company to spread truth and understanding.
Let’s not forget that while the spotlight was on ADN, the Carlyle group managed to gain control of $400 Million of our PF to “manage”.
They also gained a huge foothold in the Oil and Gas market through their new partnership with Hilcorp.
This is the true value Rubenstein obtained through buying out and liquidating ADN in Alaska.
“How much influence does the Carlyle Group now have on the government of Alaska? Without the transparency promised by candidate Bill Walker, the public doesn’t even know the questions it should be asking.”
“Rubenstein is on the record telling investors that there is good investment value to be found in distressed oil and gas companies right now. “In time (oil) prices will come back, in time demand will catch up with supply, and in time I do believe that carbon-related energy will turn out to be one of the best investments in the world,” he told a group of investors in Johannesburg recently.
“We are, in the United States and outside the United States, very active. I don’t want to predict any wide-scale declines in the value of all these (oil) companies but I do think there will be opportunities to buy things at lower prices.”
http://mustreadalaska.com/richards-push-permanent-fund-invest-oil-gas/
Steve, you are posting another weird conspiracy theory. And who are you quoting?
I doubt Rubenstein was behind Alice’s insanity. He was already separated and negotiating a divorce while Alice was being evasive and difficult. In the end the failure of ADN cost him and Alice some serious money and probably forced Alice to finally agree to the terms of the divorce.
Interesting though how Alice was connected socially with Obama – 2 peas in a pod!
Chris the must read article posted above might be helpful. I don’t know if it’s a reliable source. Sounds legitimate? Anyway if it’s true then Rubenstien is worth reporting on and question how much pull does he and Carlyle group have in Alaska and permanent fund is valid . Especially if governors were considering taking his investment advice in any form as to permanent fund that Carlyle manages . Pretty iffy to buy into a failing business and create a bunch of state ties that may create conflicts of interest when dealing with them about taxes and permitting. Pretty shaky ground. But that was walkers way . Hopefully new governor knows how to be more careful about impropriety. Another valid question is did rogof and Rubenstein divorce to limit his liability from creditors over adn fiasco ? Rich folks don’t like letting go of money. Does Alice still have associations with rubenstein and did rubenstein remarry ? Yeah I know – adn dead – Alice is gone / move on but all the same it’s important for citizens to know inner workings of media / politics/ and rich powerful entities control in Alaska or elsewhere. Maybe must read Alaska should present where they got their info .
2016 was so 5 minutes ago.
There were a lot of corrupt power players back then. But I guarantee Rubenstein was not interested in Alice’s political schmoozing conspiracy. Alice’s dream was to turn Alaska D. That was the most effective strategy for Alice to enshrine herself as a Diva D. It failed. Massively. Savvy observers like myself were immediately on to it.
Yet, she was Obama’a Alaska Diva. Makes sense now. A couple of empty promises.
It seems Steve Stine and Opinion are closely related? It’s almost like they are the same person?
I just don’t think you should mix real names and fake names comments.
Chris,
In case you have not been told….
Conspiracy means “a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful”.
Posting quotes from a MRAK story does not even fit your warped right wing definition of a conspiracy.
As for David’s interest in AK….
Well, do your own homework.
The Carlyle group was very active while Alice was “wagging the dog” at ADN.
Between the $400 Million in PF “holdings” and Hilcorp’s various investments throughout the state from building fake islands in the Beaufort Sea all the way to gas and oil wells in the Cook Inlet…
I can say with certainty that Rubenstein has made a hell of a lot more money than he spent in AK on ADN (and most sources will tell you that David was funding Alice’s “project” for a while).
Lastly, I have only commented under my real name on this site and you can go back and realize that “Opinion” rarely agrees with me on any subject.
Sorry Chris but the Oligarchs grip on Alaska’s economy is a clear and present situation…one that is not going away in the near future.
So Steve Stine,
I accept your claim you are a real person.
It just seemed to me Opinion had the same mannerisms and inflections.
Nonetheless, you both seem crazed with a conspiracy from 2016 that was prevented by the brave resistance of real Alaskans. At this point, I don’t see how you are helping us. You seem to be just a minor distraction.
Chris 👍 . Crazed might be a strong word. How about interested and concerned? Are you an insider on the subject? Do you have more viable information you can share so we don’t have to put bits and pieces together? What is your qualifications as expert on this subject. Thanks! !!!
Well Chris Nyman…
Only time will tell who can make a difference up here and who is just a minor “distraction”…but like my first boss in AK said years ago “folks go from hero to zero real quick in Alaska”.
As for Carlyle Group’s rise to power while Alice was crying Bankruptcy a few years ago….well there are many documents that show exactly how much money they are pulling in from AK.
“Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., Juneau, committed a total of up to $1.75 billion to Carlyle Group and Blackstone Group, with half of the money committed to co-investments, confirmed Mike Burns, executive director.”
“Alaska Permanent also committed up to $375 million to two or three Carlyle private equity funds.”
“It has targeted investments in Carlyle International Energy Partners and NGP Natural Resources XI. A yet-to-be-formed agribusiness or metals and mining fund might also receive an allocation.”
I firmly believe the money David spent on ADN was a really good “write off” in the end.
No more Tony H. or Alaskan Dispatch to monitor Carlyle’s sucking of AK PF and Hilcorp gets to “frack” the state away for more oil and gas…Win Win in the end!
https://www.pionline.com/article/20130719/ONLINE/130719841/alaska-permanent-commits-up-to-175-billion-total-to-carlyle-group-blackstone-group
I might agree that Alice’s socialist impulses would ultimately make the capitalists even richer. That is always how socialist ideas fail. There is always corruption at the top as they let the bottom fail.
A met Dougherty once; what a pompous A-Hole. Good riddance to him.
I would love to see another Pat Dougherty opinion column. It would explain everything.
Craig, it is time to let it go, AR is about done. She is not worthy of your continued coverage of her eventual demise.
On another note:
Print news and most print magazines have become a dying business. Majority of major print news is already on the digital format. A recent poll claimed more than 50% of US population gets their news from social media.
POTUS watches Fox & Friends, Fox News and send tweets on a daily basis. He does not read any newspapers or briefings that are printed.
This is evidently our future, accept it or not, it will happen anyway.
Yep why spend money on the daily news . They lost their best reporters. So many of The ones left write like drones . If Somebody says write it a certain way they do . They don’t do very much real reporting anymore. It’s mixed with so much propaganda it’s hard to decipher whats factual and what’s poorly written opinion. Reporting on the other side of the story must be forbidden for them . The slow disappearance of paper news I say it’s a good thing. Reduce the stranglehold they have on world narratives. Opens up more space for independent media . Perhaps more True free press . I guess though it’s safer not to publish facts . Just ask Assange. He should have stuck with making stuff up ,publish only opinion or party line propaganda. Sure as heck don’t publish facts ! Facts bad 😡 – can’t let public know what really happens! I say Free Assange ! Drop all charges. Protect the first amendment! Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ; or abridging the freedom of speech,or of the press , or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The archaic definition of abridgeing our forfathers used = no law that “deprive” or “shorten”the rights of the press . The press clearly has broad rights and the right to push for attainment of information that is of interest to various countries citizens. Otherwise they have no reason to exist. So in my mind it’s quite clear assange had the right and immunity to push Manning for information and consider helping him obtain it . Without the freedom of the press a democracy can not function as a democracy. Citizens must be accurately informed to cast a viable vote when electing representatives. Therefore freedom of press is imperative and our forefathers knew this thus their putting protections for the press in the first amendment along side freedom of speech. Someone more educated than I should elaborate. The law against conspiracy is pretty questionable itself and borderline Orwellian. It may be infringement on freedom of speech . In assange case it’s clearly an infringement on freedom of the press . How else are they supposed to get state secrets that are hidden but important for the public to be informed so the public can make informed choices? The only other way is to freely give press access to everything our government does . ( I don’t think that’s reasonable ) thus our need to rely on press and whistle blowers working together. Our forefathers knew government wasn’t to be fully trusted thus the myriad checks and balances. Thus the first amendment protections of the press was to keep the government functioning correctly as one of its checks and balances. Thus my opinion that doj is out of bounds for charging assange and requesting his extradition. The extreme protection of the press is for a significant reason. Keeping our democracy functional and intact by informing the public and reducing the effects of ~ power corrupts . It’s possible the press is more important than any branch of government for a true democracy or republic to be able to exist.