The Seattle Times Co. has signed an agreement to restructure its debt, a move that publisher Frank Blethen says ensures the company’s long-term survival,
the
Seattle Times
reported.
The agreement gives the company the breathing room it needs to sell property, rebuild cash flow, and pay off its debt, Blethen said…. Blethen said he and other company executives have been analyzing bankruptcy as a survival tool since the summer of 2008…. But negotiating the debt means the locally owned paper, published by the Blethen family for 113 years, will be able to stay in business, Blethen said.
According to the report, a pivotal event was Hearst Corp’s decision in to end a joint operating agreement (JOA) between Hearst’s
Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
which closed in March 2009, and the
Times,
in which the two papers maintained separate newsrooms while the Times handled business operations of both.
The Times Co. had been trying to get out from under the JOA for years, first in court, in a four-year, ultimately unsuccessful battle to end the agreement. Then in the summer of 2008 the company began examining bankruptcy as a strategy, for “the sole reason” of getting out of the JOA, Blethen said.
The
Times
report also noted that the paper made a series of cuts beginning in 2008 that continued into 2009 and 2010, including employee concessions and the sale of papers in Maine and some real estate.
The company is not making money in 2010 and did not in 2009, Blethen told the
Times.
(Source:
Seattle Times,
Feb. 5, 2010.)
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