I have long thought that the bottom line on New York investors' conferences comes after the Power Points are over and the executives have gone home. Did their sales pitches move the market?
Generally they do not, but there were two exceptions among the public newspaper companies that presented this week. New York Times Co. shares kicked up a bit based on a strong November revenue and earnings report a day before the company's executives spoke.
McClatchy's battered stock had a boost of about 3 percent for the week, not because of CEO Gary Pruitt's charm and persuasiveness, but because he said the company's earnings will beat the consensus Wall Street forecast and increase in 2008 despite continued revenue losses. (That is thanks to cost controls, lower interest payments and getting past some other special expenses associated with its purchase of Knight Ridder.)
On a more speculative note, the abundance of British and Asian accents among the questioners had me again mulling a remote but not inconceivable possibility: Might foreign investors step up and buy some of these distressed properties, especially with the dollar so weak?
A threshold question is whether that would be legal.
Ann Hollifield, a University of Georgia journalism professor who has studied ownership issues, told me this morning that there is a strict ban on a foreign company buying a television station, but she knows of no such restrictions vis-à-vis newspapers.
That there are few such owners may be more a practical management question: Would foreign owners have an instant credibility problem, especially with plenty of Lou Dobbs-style xenophobia in the air right now?
Hollifield did a scholarly piece a few years back on whether Canada-based Thomson Corporation had heavier than normal coverage of the Quebec separatism issue in its U.S. papers. (Her answer was yes.) Imagine the hoo-hah if a Chinese-owned U.S. newspaper was editorializing about tainted toys and air pollution at the Beijing Olympics.
