Old TT threads that alluded to The Blade being sold

The sale did not occur.

• Aug 18, 2003 - Blade squabbling - (2 Comments)
• Feb 17, 2006 - Blade To Go On The Auction - Block? - (103 comments)
• Feb 19, 2006 - Blade maybe sold soon - (10 comments)
• Sep 14, 2006 - Block Comm. may sell Post-Gazette - (30 comments)

Feb 24, 2004 comment

WSPD is reporting that the Blade could be for sale "someday."

"More talk about selling the Toledo Blade, and this time it comes from the Blade's managing director Alan Block, who in a letter to the employes says the attitude that the "Block's will never sell the Blade" is "unrealistic" because of current market pressures which could force a sale to a large chain."

"Alan Block says in that letter, that the "days are over" when one division, the cablevision division which he runs, will send profits to rescue the other and the Blade hasn't turned a profit since the early 1980's. Block informed the employes in that letter that the Blade "isn't healthy" and that no job will be secure until it is."

2006 comment that contained quotes from Allan Block about the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

"I think the P-G has a staff that is too big. Some of it is feather-bedding. In these times, how do you justify that? We have people that have been on the staff for decades and are no longer productive. Any business, no matter how it’s doing … shouldn’t have more people than we need."

Additional info from the 2006 story that the comment excerpted:

What really determines a paper’s financial health, though, is advertising. Ads account for about 80 percent of most papers’ revenue, according to the State of the News Media.

Although want ads in Craigslist and Monster.com have cut great swaths into those revenues, Poynter’s Rick Edmonds sees more of a threat to print from online catalogs -- all ads, no editorial content -- and news aggregators like Yahoo! News and Google News. Such sites compile links to print stories worldwide but deliver them to readers without the accompanying advertisements.

I heard in the past that the newspaper industry used to earn 65 percent of its revenue from classified ads.

#media - #business