[Infowarrior] - Privately-held Weather Channel up for sale

[Richard Forno]

Chain Said to Seek Bids for Weather Channel
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/business/media/03weather.html?_r=1&oref=sl
ogin&pagewanted=print

The Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, is
being put up for sale and could fetch more than $5 billion, according to
people briefed on the auction. The channel and its rapidly growing Web site,
weather.com, are already attracting interest from some of the biggest names
in media, including NBC, a unit of General Electric; the News Corporation;
and Comcast, these people said.

The sale of the Weather Channel, these people said, is part of a larger
breakup of its parent, Landmark Communications, a privately held company
controlled by the Batten family of Norfolk, Va., which also owns daily
newspapers and other media properties. Landmark¹s newspaper holdings include
The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., and
The Roanoke Times in Virginia, as well as 50 other community newspapers. The
company, which does not release its earnings, generated $1.75 billion in
revenue in 2006 and has 12,000 employees, according to Hoover¹s.

JPMorgan Chase is advising Landmark on the sale of the Weather Channel, and
Lehman Brothers is advising the company on the sale of its other media
assets, people briefed on the process said.

A spokesman for Landmark could not be reached.

The sale of the Weather Channel, once written off as a dull network for
weather buffs, could become especially heated as it is one of the few
remaining basic cable channels available for sale. One potential suitor
approached by Landmark described the Weather Channel as ³beachfront
property.²

Its audience has mushroomed as the channel has expanded its coverage of
hurricanes and others storms around the world and created programming about
climate change, taking an aggressive and sometimes controversial role in the
global warming debate.

The channel is also a godsend for advertisers. Like live sports, it is
largely immune from TiVos and other digital video recorders. The channel has
800 employees; 125 are meteorologists.

Perhaps more appealing for some big media companies may be the Weather
Channel¹s Web business, which was started in 1995. Weather.com ranks as the
nation¹s 18th-largest media site by traffic, with more than 32 million
unique users in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That is bigger
than CNN and Facebook.

Weather.com has partnerships with dozens of big media companies. In October,
the site struck a deal to provide forecasts to MySpace, a unit of the News
Corporation. The company also has deals with Yahoo and AOL.

Among the Weather Channel¹s suitors, NBC is expected to compete
aggressively, people involved in the auction said. NBC has a weather-related
unit called NBC Weather Plus, a joint project of NBC News and NBC
affiliates, but the venture has never taken off. NBC Weather Plus includes a
cable channel, frequently available only on digital cable platforms and high
on the dial, along with a Web site, weatherplus.com.

Fox, a unit of the News Corporation, has also expressed interest in the
Weather Channel, which it could link with its Fox News cable channel and its
hundreds of affiliates. Other big media companies like Comcast, which is
increasingly looking to add content, may participate in the auction as well.
Time Warner and perhaps even Yahoo could also jump in.

Media companies have expressed interest in the Weather Channel before. In an
interview last June, Debora J. Wilson, the Weather Channel¹s chief
executive, said: ³Every media conglomeration has approached Landmark, and
there¹s never been a yes. We actually think that we¹re stronger being
independent.² Ms. Wilson added that she was glad to avoid the ³distractions²
that would come with being part of a larger company. ³We like focusing on
what we do.²

The breakup and sale of Landmark Communications would spell the end of a
small but storied fixture in the media landscape. The company was formed at
the turn of the 20th century when Samuel L. Slover acquired The Newport News
Times-Herald in Virginia. Mr. Slover¹s nephew, Frank Batten, the former
chairman, took over the company in 1954. Over the years, Mr. Batten bought
and sold newspapers and television affiliates in the South and Midwest.

It is unclear how big the appetite will be for the company¹s remaining
newspaper assets, though community newspapers have fared much better than
large dailies in recent years.

Of course, Mr. Batten¹s best investment was the creation of the Weather
Channel in 1982.

In his memoir, ³The Weather Channel: The Improbable Rise of a Media
Phenomenon,² Mr. Batten wrote: ³Our first year was full of crises and a
full-fledged near-death experience,² but eventually ³narrowcasting ‹ the
long-delayed potential of cable television ‹ has become a reality.²