A.H. Belo chief looking at ‘sensible’ cost cuts

A.H. Belo Corp. said first-quarter results fell short of its forecasts and announced plans to lower expenses to cope with the toughest newspaper advertising market in the past 60 years.
A.H. Belo will look at “every sensible expense reduction,” Chief Executive Officer Robert Decherd said last week in a letter to investors. The Dallas-based company, spun off from Belo Corp. in January, owns the Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal and a newspaper in Riverside, Calif.
This year will be “very difficult,” Decherd said. The company will reduce the size of its publications to save money on newsprint and shrink its circulation area to stop distributing copies to areas far from city centers that advertisers don’t want to reach, Decherd wrote.
“The newspaper industry is operating in a very tough environment – an environment unprecedented in the past 60 years,” Decherd said.
The stock has fallen more than 45 percent since the spinoff. Belo Corp., also based in Dallas, retained its 20 television stations and two cable-news channels.
Decherd, 57, did not say which targets the company missed. A.H. Belo predicted Feb. 13 that newspaper revenue would decline more slowly this year than in 2007, when sales dropped 9.7 percent to $738.7 million and profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization fell 14 percent to $135.9 million.
A.H. Belo also will raise the cover price of its newspapers. Printing narrower newspapers will save $1.4 million this year, while the price increase will add $6 million in revenue, Decherd said. The company planned to report first-quarter results on April 28.
Decherd is trimming operations after newspaper industry ad sales dropped 9.4 percent last year. •