Berkshire Hathaway and Vanguard biggest investors in newspaper companies

3/7/11, "Who owns newspaper companies? The banks, funds, and investors and their (big) slices of the industry," Nieman Journalism Lab, by Martin Langeveld

• "Which investors are making the biggest bets in the newspaper business? To find out, I aggregated and ranked the total newspaper holdings of all of the top investors in each company. Here’s the result (leaving out News Corp., as noted above):

Berkshire Hathaway’s Washington Post Company holding, it turns out, is the biggest single investment in U.S. newspapers, with a current value of $759 million. Not far behind, though, is Vanguard,

• with $703 million invested through a variety of funds in every public newspaper company:

Washington Post, A.H. Belo, Gannett, Journal Communications, McClatchy, New York Times, Scripps, Media General, and Lee Enterprises. If this were one big company,

• Vanguard would own 6.74 percent of it.

As Wall Street investments go, though, Vanguard’s across-the-board bet on newspapers is smaller than a rounding error — it has $1.4 trillion in invested assets, so its newspaper holdings are about 1/20th of a percent of its investments. And, to put the U.S. publishers in perspective versus the News Corp. juggernaut,

• Vanguard’s investment in News Corp. alone is worth $2.5 billion.

After Berkshire Hathaway and Vanguard, the list drops quickly to smaller investments by JP Morgan Chase ($543 million), Ariel Investments ($497 million), and BlackRock ($335 million). (BlackRock, with $3.6 trillion under management, is the world’s largest money manager and the sixth-largest owner of Gannett stock.)...

Generally, at all of these companies, the total institutional/mutual fund ownership is between 60 and 90 percent;

• insiders hold no more than single-digit percentages in the aggregate.

Conclusion: While Alden and others, using MediaNews as a base of operations, may be looking to engineer some mergers, consolidations, and realignments in the distressed sector, they don’t have a significant enough toehold in the more stable public sector

• to have a similar impact there."...

via Poynter.org/Romenesko

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