It’s good and bad news for the Post this quarter, as profits are down close to 20% thanks to that unpleasant business in Louisiana and Mississippi a couple of months ago. Thankfully, nobody from the company was killed in the storms that hit the region, but they did cause a fair amount of damage to Cable One’s equipment and infrastructure, according to the earnings release.
Through the end of the third quarter of 2005, the Company recorded an estimated $9.9 million loss of property, plant and equipment, incurred an estimated $4.2 million in incremental clean-up, repair and other expenses in connection with the hurricane, and experienced an estimated $4.4 million reduction in operating income from granting a 30-day service credit to all its 94,000 pre-hurricane Gulf Coast subscribers; additional costs related to the hurricane recovery will continue to be incurred in the fourth quarter of 2005.
I suppose the one bright side may be that if there were any plans to upgrade the infrastructure in the area, they just got approved by default.
Meanwhile, back at the flagship property, circulation continues its steady decline.
For the first nine months of 2005, Post daily and Sunday circulation each declined 3.9% compared to the same period of the prior year. For the nine months ended October 2, 2005, average daily circulation at The Post totaled 681,600 and average Sunday circulation totaled 974,900.
The good news? Despite the dropoff, overall revenue grew 7% over last year thanks to gains at Kaplan and an upswing in revenue from both the newspaper and the various websites. In fact, online publishing revenue was up almost 25% both for the quarter and for the first nine months of the year. Results for Express are buried in the newspaper division results, but I’m led to believe they’re hitting whatever their internal goals may be. (At least, nobody’s upstairs muttering to themselves.)
I would be saddened, but not necessarily surprised, to see daily circulation fall below 650,000 by next quarter, barring a massive turnaround.
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