Tag: Tronc

LA.com’s Mystery Owners Launching Premium Email Address

LA.com’s New Owners Ready “Portal” For Los Angeles News and Events, Plus a Pricey email address for only $99.

by Domain Buddha

How does [email protected] Sound? It has a certain ring to it!

After years of just sitting in the ownership bin of the Tribune-Tronc crew, LA.com has been sold and is ready to launch under new ownership.  The purchase price was not revealed, but it was listed for sale for 5 million.   I said at the time that was a fair price, although the head Tronc had paid one million for it a few years before.  He was intending to link it to the Los Angeles Times, but things went wild for the Troncs, and they sold the Times and the San Diego Tribune to another rich guy in the Medical business.  Only they didn’t mention LA.com, or he didn’t want it.  Big mistake.

So now LA.com has a new owner.  Who is it?  Not announced yet.  Elon Musk?  Probably not, he’s chasing the little bluebird.  I would have guessed Eli Broad, who had at least a passing interest in owning the Los Angeles Times at one point.  He passed away last year, so we can rule him out, unless he’s running it from the spirit world.  Any clues? Not much.  The logo for the new email service looks kind of like a sports patch,  like a baseball patch for the St. Louis Cardinals.  Hmm, a whole new dimension could be around the corner.  Could the new owner be a rich retired sports guy?

The new site is billed as a “Portal”, with a focus on local news and events.  That sounds like PR talk for a site that will flood out corporate news releases and put an event calendar full of happy-talk wine and cheese meet-ups and lectures on metaphysics and woke-ism.

The main push right now is for all of Los Angeles elitists and Hollywood high-lifers to pop for the exclusive $99 per year for your new, very “in”, very cool, email address:  like “[email protected]” for example.  If you act now, you can get it for half price.  (Even Hollywood folks like a bargain once in a while).

But who cares that much about email?  Everyone is now on their phones, messaging or using signal.  Email is fading.  Everybody has an address, but so does the post office.  Who writes and mails a letter anymore?  Not many folks compared to how many are using their iphones for messages.  I’m not saying email is dead yet, but it is not what it was.  The phone is the thing.  Is this a grand old time to launch an elitist email service?  G-mail, Outlook, and many others are free.  Is it an “ad-free” service?  No details were posted on LA.com.  With the economy turning down and raging inflation, is the bottom 99% going to blow about a hundred bucks a year for an email address?  How does the new owner expect to make back his 5 million purchase price by selling an expensive email service?  And then there was the big London email and phone scandal a few years ago, but I digress.  The important thing about email is privacy and security, meaning no snooping by anyone.

The big picture is that LA.com could become the go-to site for big news, scandals, Hollywood, entertainment, etc.  A big city tabloid on your phone (or ipad or computer).  The trend is that the new powerful phones are what folks are using.  Even laptop use is somewhat fading.

Stay tuned for more information on LA.com.  Hope it’s not going to be a cross between the old L.A. Weakly during it’s last 5 days and Friday’s Calendar section from the El Segundo Woke News.  We don’t need that great name to be wasted on a Portal to Ho-Hum land.

Is LA.com Really Worth $5 Million?

Tribune Holdout From L.A. Times Sale Finally Comes Out of Hiding.

The good old days when everyone was talking and reading about the LA Times – Cover of “Billion Dollar Blackjack”

When the Tribune boys sold the L.A. Times to one of its shareholders, Patrick Soon-Shiong,  there were a lot of goodies left out of the deal.  Remembering back to that time and the chaos surrounding the events, it’s a wonder things didn’t get really berserk.  Here’s some memories:

Tribune had changed its name of the Times group to Tronc.  Oh God, what a field day we all had making fun of that lunacy.  The worst corporate re-name in history.

The Times was losing dough, and beset by union problems, staff bailing out, pension buy-outs and financial troubles.

The Tribune guys were ex-medical business guys, fat with cash from a sale to IBM.  They dumped  the Times and San Diego Union on one of their shareholders, another really wealthy medical business guy.  Did any of this group even have a paper route when they were kids? Don’t think so.

The building didn’t go with the deal. The paper boys had to move west.

What didn’t Mr. Soon-Shiong get?  No real estate.  The Times iconic HQ was sold to some Canadians.  The property where the papers were printed had been sold in 2010.  And the biggest sleeper of all, LA.com, which the Troncs had purchased for a reported million dollars, was held back.  The buyer got the Times for $500 million, but it was the newspapers only.

For 500 million (roughly the debt that the Times had accumulated) he should have asked for  LA.com to be thrown in the deal.  A missed opportunity.

The Tribune/Tronc boys had put up a landing page, but did nothing with the digital property.  Now it is for sale for $5 Million.  Is it worth it?

Well, let’s see.  It is the greatest two letter name for one of the greatest cities in the world.  Forget about the recent lunatics who temporarily occupy the government.  They will eventually be gone, along with the miles of homeless camps, nut cakes and dopers who now occupy the streets.  A new regime of competent business guys with common sense will solve the problems, really help out the homeless, put the criminals into rehab or jail and get the city back on track.  So yes, the price for the .com is fair. The sale is being handled by MediaOptions.com, one of the great domain brokers.

One more word about the price.  In Santa Monica real estate developers are buying up houses for 2 million, tearing them down, and building mega-mansions for sale at 10 million   So the greatest dot com that you could ever get for Los Angeles could easily be worth 10-15 million right now.  The price of a new mc-mansion.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, executive chairman and chief executive officer of Abraxis BioScience Inc.,speaks at the World Health Care Congress in Oxon Hill, Maryland, U.S., on Tuesday, April 13, 2010. The meeting of chief executive officers and senior executives from all sectors of the health care industry runs until April 14. Photographer: Jay Mallin/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Will Patrick Soon-Shiong step up and buy this?  The Times moved its HQ to El Segundo, a pleasant beach area town.  It is so lame that it is now referred to as The El Segundo Times.  It is pathetic.  Money comes in from Red China every week as a complete propaganda section of several pages to prop up the advertising.  The paper is a shadow of its former self of the 1970s when it had great foreign correspondents around the globe.

The only way out of this mess is for Mr. Soon-Shiong to buy LA.com and turn it into the major, dynamic website of the City.  Get rid of the agit-prop crew that writes the current nonsense and hire some writers and editors from the New York tabs.  Get the Paparazzi on the payroll.  Blow the City wide open.  The corruption, the celebs, the lunacy, is all there, waiting to be featured on LA.com.  Put the Times back in the center of the action.

And one more thing.  Don’t wait too long, there’s plenty of aggressive dudes waiting in the wings looking for adoration on the way to immortality.  And maybe one of them even had a paper route back in the day.

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