Newspaper companies abandoned by “savvy investors” as dinosaur stocks have been beating the Dow over the past 12 months — handily:
Those beating the Dow were: New York Times (+25%), AH Belo (+126%), Gatehouse (+350%), Lee Enterprises (+763%), McClatchy (+296%), Journal Communications (+56%), EW Scripps (+208%), Media General (+388%), Gannett (+65%) and News Corp. (+57%). Only Washington Post Co. (+6%) lagged the market.
Then again, over 15,000 in the news business lost their jobs. The improved stock performance has come more from cost-cutting than revenue growth, a trend we’ll likely see continue in 2010.