Statesman Owners Give Up

Cox Enterprises, owners of the American-Statesman and a bunch of other media outlets, has apparently given up on the failing daily.

I personally like this gem of a quote, from their article about themselves:

"The decision was made as part of an ongoing strategic review of our portfolio and enables us to maintain our strong and stable financial performance by further paying down debt," Cox chairman and chief executive Jim Kennedy said.

Roughly translated, this appears to mean: the papers we're unloading are hemorrhaging money like there's no tomorrow, and we're going to squeeze what little value is left out of them by dumping them ASAP.

Well, gee, I don't see why the Statesman hasn't been more successful in recent years. Let's see, just this year they've tried reducing the amount of features (to the annoyance of many), and when that didn't help revenues enough, they went ahead and raised the daily price 50%. And, surprisingly, that seemingly didn't help them to get more subscribers either.

Here's hoping the new owner figures out how to produce a quality newspaper that people still want to read. Cox apparently has forgotten this.

Update: Hello statesman.com! Really, I bear you no ill will, but you gotta admit, you're right up there in the bad-PR department with Capital Metro these days...

Update 2: Story's been pulled from statesman.com. This is a hunch, but it may have been due to the not-so-civil discussion that erupted in the comments.

And comments I've seen in two places now have expressed the hope that McClatchy will buy the paper. Is McClatchy better than Cox? Or are newspapers a dying breed regardless of who owns them at this point?

Update 3: Story has reappeared.