And, now, mighty Gannett is just a pale shadow of itself with newspapers shrunk down to a tiny little few and very limited assets and so forth. Every newspaper publisher was hugely powerful in his own community, so they were like the lords of England, all these publishers. The executives used to ride around in giant airplanes and be treated like lords of England when they went to publishers’ conventions. One is Gannett, which used to own the monopoly newspaper in - I don’t know - fifty, sixty, one hundred different cities. If you look in the small- and mid-cap edition of the Value Line books, you’ll find there are two entries left. That’s the future and, like many a publishing company which used newsprint, it’s a miracle when any survive. So we’ve got a slow, difficult business of chewing our way into a huge market that’s not going away - with one big competitor in it. It’s just a very slow, difficult business. The bad news is that it’s a long, slow slog where you deal with a lot of bureaucracies in response to RFPs (requests for proposals). The good news is that we’re in a huge market because all the courts of the world are in the stone age still in terms of automating with modern technology, so it’s a big market. The future of this business is not in the publishing side, it’s on the Journal Technologies side. Steve actually ran a small software company in Canada for years and years and years which is quite similar to what Journal Technologies does, so that’s how we got together. Our circulation went way down, so we’ve had a drastic change in good fortune in our publishing business. When the internet came along, it destroyed our position. That was all made in the foreclosure boom and, of course, in the old days we had an information monopoly on publishing the appellate court’s decisions, daily and newsprint. We made a lot of extra money out of the publishing business in its heyday and that was about $30 million. 3 a natural area to allocate excess capital for the best return on equity for the company? How does the current investment manager think about investing in Daily Journal’s equity portfolio in relation to re-investing in growing areas of the business or share buybacks?ĬM: It’s all very simple.
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