Fewer faces for next year's photo.

[UPDATE: United Media Guild tweets the number is now at six. Four copy editors, one photographer and one manager laid off. Erica Smith emailed to correct that one copy editor was part-time, the other was a full-time employee. The following post has been slightly tweaked to reflect that.]

Twitter sweetheart Erica Smith tweets that our lone daily paper has laid off two copy editors and a photographer so far today. More menacingly, she notes that she'll update her Storify post as necessary.
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Charles Jaco's request prompted the AG's Office.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said yesterday that his office plans to release details of plans to renovate the Edward Jones Dome regardless of a confidentiality agreement that has kept the proposal out of public view.

Per the deal that brought the Rams to St. Louis from Los Angeles, the Rams could leave the city if the dome is not among the "top tier" of stadiums by 2015. In February the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission presented the Rams with a $124-million plan to upgrade the facility with the public and the team picking up the tab. In March the Rams rejected the offer. On May 1 the Rams presented CVC with a counter proposal shrouded in secrecy with the team and the CVC stating that they'd agreed to a confidentiality agreement not to release details.

Enter Koster.
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You'd be smiling too if you had the year Mary Junck had.

Post-Dispatch employees enrolled in the Pulitzer pension plan received letters this weekend notifying them that Lee Enterprises chose to exercise an election that allowed the company to defer paying into the plan for all of 2011.

So Lee deferred making payments to employee pensions for 2011, but gave CEO Mary Junck and CFO Carl Schmidt performance bonuses totaling $500,000 and $250,000 respectively. That's three-quarters of a million dollars in cash prizes for taking the company into bankruptcy.
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Newsies, get it? Eh, it'll all make sense after the jump.

Matt Wirz of the Wall Street Journal reports that famed investor Warren Buffett, "the Oracle of Omaha," has purchased $85 million of Lee Enterprise's debt through his Berkshire Hathaway investment company. The purchase translates to a four percent ownership of the company,  which itself owns the Post-Dispatch among other publications.

It's not Buffett's first venture into the newspaper biz, by any means.
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(c) Universal Syndicate

​The Post-Dispatch's "Editor's Desk" column today informed readers that Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" will not appear in the paper this week because the subject matter -- Trudeau's belief that Texas' mandatory ultrasounds for women who choose to have an abortion is tantamount to rape -- is too graphic in language and content for the comics page. Instead, you can read it online at www.stltoday.com/comics.More >>

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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