Lee Enterprises stock has declined over the last fiscal year; revenue is expected to have dropped 3.3 percent during that time.

​The fiscal year is over for Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star and a host of other daily newspapers -- and the news is not good. While the company is still finalizing its accounting, it projects that revenue will be down 3.3 percent for this past year compared to the one before that.

And while 3.3 percent isn't terrible -- the economy continues to stink, and the proliferation of free content online continues to make profitability difficult for newspapers -- it's problematic in that revenue was already down 7.3 percent in 2010 compared to 2010. So they're not just declining; they're declining from a previous decline.
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The P-D faces another lawsuit over retiree benefits.

​The beleaguered St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- already fending off a lawsuit from the Newspaper Guild over retiree benefits -- now faces another suit from the union representing its mailroom workers.

The CWA Local 14620, also known as the St. Louis Mailers Union No. 3, represents the 220 employees who work in the mailroom, as well as retirees, says Richard Rosenblatt, an attorney with Colorado-based Rosenblatt & Gosch. It filed suit yesterday in an attempt to force the company to resume providing healthcare for the 22 retirees who were kicked off the company's plan in March.

"They made a promise to long-term employees when they retired," Rosenblatt says. "The union is simply trying to enforce the promise they made to their long-term, loyal employees."
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Late yesterday afternoon, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, parent company of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, announced some potentially pretty good news: The company had gotten an agreement to push back the due date on some $864 million in debt.

That deal is dependent on the company refinancing another $175 million in debt -- and the company indicated in yesterday's announcement that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization is not out of the question. But considering that Lee's massive debt had been due in April 2012, the news was pretty good.

It just didn't do much for the company's stock.
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A reprieve -- or maybe a Chapter 11 reorganization, for Lee Enterprises.

​Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, including the Arizona Daily Star, announced late this afternoon that it reached an agreement with "a significant majority" of its debt holders to amend and extend its credit to 2015 and 2017 -- instead of next April, when the debt was supposed to come due.

The company currently has nearly $1 billion debt; the agreement announced today will delay payment on $689 million of it.

But there's a big "but" to the plan: As a condition to the extension, Lee must refinance an additional $175 million in debt, the company disclosed. That debt, known as the "Pulitzer Notes," was incurred when the company purchased the Post-Dispatch and other papers in the Pulitzer chain in 2005.

And if it can't find someone willing to do the refinancing, Lee says, it will file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.
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courtesy of Google Finance.

Lee Enterprises' stock (shown in blue) is down 20 percent in the last six months, as this graph shows. Fellow media giants Gannett (in red) and McClatchy (in yellow) have also lost considerable value.

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Another quarterly report, another piece of bad news.

That's the woefully predictable pattern coming out of Davenport, Iowa, the home of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's parent company, Lee Enterprises. As we reported last month, the newspaper company's stock has fallen so precipitously that it's in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE typically doesn't list stocks that sell for less than $1 per share, as their low value makes them subject to wild swings in value; as of July 1, Lee was trading at 99 cents per share.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. As of today, the company's stock is trading at just 71 cents per share. That's attributable to the stock market's overall poor health (as you can see in the graph above, both Gannett and McClatchy have also dropped over the last six months), but Friday's latest earning report certainly didn't help.
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Lee Enterprises could lose its spot on the New York Stock Exchange.

​The stock for Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based newspaper company that owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has dropped to bargain-level prices -- as of July 1, it was trading at a mere 99 cents per share.

And that could have serious repercussions for the struggling Iowa-based newspaper chain. The New York Stock Exchange typically does not tolerate stocks that sell for cheaper than a dollar -- since even a small drop in their value can lead to a huge percentage loss on paper. (If the price drops 50 cents, says, that's a 50 percent drop in value -- making for market turmoil.)

The NYSE warned the company July 8 that if it doesn't make some changes, it'll be booted from the stock exchange after a six-month warning period. And, during that warning period, it will be forced to carry a "BC" indicator next to its listing -- meaning the company is below compliance.
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Wright-Jones blames reporter for stirring things up on "sleepy summer afternoon."

​Updated 9:35 a.m. with reaction from Jake Wagman.

In a page-one story Sunday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, political reporter Jake Wagman exposes several accounting irregularities in the campaign filings of state senator Robin Wright-Jones (D - St. Louis).

The piece alleges that tens of thousands of dollars from Wright-Jones' campaign funds are unaccounted for and that the state senator seems to have used at least some of the money for personal expenses, including a pair of $111 shoes from the Galleria.

But is the the article much ado about nothing? That's what Wright-Jones contends in a press release (viewable below) that her staff fired off to St. Louis media over the weekend.
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A bad day for Lee Enterprises could become a bad day for the P-D.

​Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based company that owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Daily Star and a host of smaller newspapers, has issued a press release that explains a bit about that very bad day the company had earlier this week.

As we reported, the company had previously announced plans to refinance $1 billion in long-term debt (much of it accrued in the acquisition of the P-D and other Pulitzer papers). That would have headed off the vulture investors who were rooting for the company's bankruptcy -- always, sadly, a great way to rake in the bucks for the money guys who invest in troubled companies. But the company unexpectedly announced Monday it was jettisoning that plan, citing only unspecified "market conditions."

Today, the release from Lee CEO Mary Junck goes much further in explaining just what's afoot.
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Stock down; refinancing on hold. Not a good day for the P-D's parent company.

​The parent company of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lee Enterprises, announced plans yesterday morning a plan to refinance nearly $1 billion of debt -- only to announce later in the day they were abandoning those plans due to unspecified "market conditions."

Say what?

We're not really sure what's going on here, beyond the fact that Lee's stock was way down yesterday. (As one financial website reports, Lee had one of the worst-performing low-priced stocks yesterday, with prices down 9.9 percent.) And that may have something to do with  a quarterly report from the company, also issued yesterday, that showed a further drop in revenue -- Lee is down 3.8 percent overall, compared to this time last year.
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A miracle indeed: The P-D will escape bankruptcy.

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Lee Enterprises Inc., the Iowa-based company that purchased the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the thirteen other papers in the Pulitzer chain in 2005, appears likely to avoid bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

The company's sudden solvency is making many of its investors livid, the Journal adds. They'd invested in Lee hoping for default -- and a chance to take over the company.

So what explains Lee's good fortune? Suffice it to say, it's not that profits are up; Lee issued a press release this morning, warning that revenue will decline as much as $7.5 million this quarter compared to the same quarter last year.
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