The Ohio 'Slyder' Stock Index: Share Prices Vs. The Cost Of A Sackful Of White Castle Burgers

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- The burgers are icons familiar to nearly all Americans. A takeout menu from the White Castle restaurant on William Howard Taft Road in Cincinnati -- yes, he was a president from Ohio -- shows a sackful of 10 hamburgers costs $5.45. The Daily Bellwether is inventing a new stock index today. For example, at today's closing price of $10.78, a share of General Motors is worth 1.98 sacks of White Castles. The New York Times comes in at 2.76 sacks; Procter & Gamble at 11.67.

White Castle has trademarked the word "slyder," as the nickname for its burgers. But everybody seems to think it is spelled s-l-i-d-e-r, from the root word slide, which means to slip down a slope. So the index is perfect for tracking interesting market trends involving Ohio's publicly traded corporations.Today, for example, Cincinnati-based newspaper and TV giant E.W. Scripps Co., rose 24 cents on the New York Stock Exchange. That would buy just over half a burger. The share price at the final bell, $3.32, is valued at 61% of a sackful of White Castles.

Across the U.S., Scripps (NYSE:SSP) has about 7,200 employees at newspapers and TV stations in cities from Denver to Phoenix, Cleveland to Tampa. The fact that Americans seem willing to pay more for a sackful of White Castles than a share in their company certainly must be encouraging and comforting news to the journalists, executives and all others who toil for the Ohio-based media corporation. Are the salaries of the executives at E.W. Scripps in line with what White Castle managers earn? Is it possible that local news TV anchors -- a breed known for self-importance -- are on a par with burger flippers, or perhaps really not as valuable to society as those who stuff "slyders" into the paper sacks? At White Castle, a large milk shake costs $3.29. That's just three cents less than a Scripps' share today.

Ohio Newspapers: Another Is Born As The Cincy Post Prepares To Croak

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- Defying conventional wisdom about the prospects of the publishing industry, a new newspaper has begun publishing in Ohio.

The Norwood Times started up less than a week after the Cincinnati Post's parent, media giant E.W. Scripps Co., said it would close the afternoon metro daily on Dec. 31. Scripps is headquartered in Cincinnati, where the $2.5 billion a year company started life as a 19th century entrepreneurial enterprise. But it has apparently lost the genes that gave it a flair for risk-taking and publishing. It says that it would be unwise to switch the Post from print entirely to the Internet, which would be a bold move, a digital age experiment that could completely unleash conventional journalism from its conventional way of doing business.

Citizens for a Better Norwood, which is based in the small Cincinnati suburb that is landlocked and surrounded by the Queen City, has gotten a copy of the new independent newspaper and reports:

"This is a 12-page publication full of ads, both large and small, placed by mostly local businesses. Many have discount coupons. Sadly, one ad announces the owners of Bogle Jewelers are retiring and selling all merchandise at 25% off. There are also interesting bios about several of the business owners. From the looks of it, Mr. Hooks' advertising sales have gotten off to an excellent start."

Cincy's PM Newspaper: The Post Is Toast Dec. 31

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- E.W. Scripps Co. will shut down the Cincinnati Post on the last day of 2007, eliminating an editorial voice that has leaned Democratic in Southwest Ohio, the area of the state that has traditionally been dominated by Republican politics. The Post is an afternoon daily and has lost most of its readership over the past 30 years, and now is down to 28,549 weekday copies.

"Our time has come . . . and gone," wrote Editor Mike Phillips about death in the afternoon.

Scripps still has television stations in Ohio -- WEWS-TV, Channel 5 in Cleveland and WCPO-TV, Channel 9 in Cincinnati (the call letters are derived from Cincinnati Post). The soon to fold newspaper had a sister in Cleveland, the Press, that passed away in the 1980s, and another in Columbus, the Citizen-Journal, also deceased.

The newspaper has been in a joint operating agreement with Gannett Co. Inc., which publishes the morning Cincinnati Enquirer with approximately 200,000 papers sold Monday through Saturday. It has a reputation as a Republican newspaper.

This death in the afternoon cannot be reversed, said Rich Boehne, a former Post business writer who is now Scripp's chief operating officer. He said in a story published today that the cost of continuing a daily would be prohibitive without the joint operating agreement, which Gannett said it was cancelling. The Post was profitable and contributed about $15.4 million to its parent company's bottomline in 2005.

The Post campaigned against the regime of Boss Cox, a corrupt political organization controlled by the GOP that ran Cincinnati for years until the early 1920s. Within the past 15 years, it broke stories about corruption in the county auditor's office, which was controlled by the Republicans. Democrat Dusty Rhodes was elected as result of the scandal the Post exposed, and remains in office to this day. At the time of his election, Rhodes was the only Democrat holding countywide office other than a handful of judges.

Scripps said it would not continue the newspaper as an Internet entity.

How Democratic was the Post? In 2005, it endorsed Paul Hackett, the Iraq War veteran who called President George W. Bush an SOB. Hackett opposed Republican Jean Schmidt in the race of the OH-02 seat. Schmidt won, but the Enquirer supported her.

Soon there will be no opposition newspaper, no opinions other than the Enquirer's. There are 52 full-time newsroom employees losing jobs. They will receive severance payments. But after 126 years, there won't be a Post, the newspaper that media corporation Scripps published in the city where its headquarters in located.