Landmark Said to Seek Bids for Weather Channel

CHAIN SAID TO SEEK BIDS FOR WEATHER CHANNEL
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin]
The Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, is being put up for sale and could fetch more than $5 billion. 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. The sale of the Weather Channel 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. Landmark’s 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. 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 “beachfront property.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/business/media/03weather.html?ref=toda...
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* Landmark looks into selling Virginian-Pilot, Weather Channel
Besides The Weather Channel, Landmark’s non-newspaper properties include one of the world’s biggest weather data companies, TV stations in Las Vegas and Nashville, Tenn., and Norfolk-based Dominion Enterprises, a national chain of print and online classified-ad publications, which alone represents more than $850 million in revenue.
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/01/landmark-looks-selling-virginian-pilot%2...