Last fall, after moving out of the historic Belo Building, AND not even spending money to move "The Rock" to its rented digs, the, I am sorry, The Dallas Morning News sold the building for $33 million.
Although nobody would officially tie this to Amazon's national Grifting for Dollars work as it hunted for a second headquarters, which it eventually of course split into two parts and has now pulled back on the NYC part, everybody saw it that way, especially since KDC and Hoque backed out soon after Amazon said sorry to Dallas.
Well, the Snooze has now sold it again.
For $5 million less.
In addition, original buyer KDC said that if it resold to Amazon, the Snooze would get a cut. New buyer Ray Washburne made no such pledge, even though, technically, Amazon could come calling. He's also paying less than $6M of it up front.
There's that anti-Midas touch at work!
Per that second link, which is from D Magazine, it seems hard not to see a push by an activist shareholder for Belo to go private and/or sell the paper as being behind this in some way. A letter from said shareholder notes that Belo's digital marketing has tanked even more than the paper itself.
I think, re the digital marketing, what we have is a signature moment mix of Belo arrogance and Belo stupidity. That said, said activist investor could have found 15-20 straight years of semi-regular occurrences of that; nobody forced him to buy his shares.
No comments:
Post a Comment