Gawker: valleywag, scripps

Ousted Yahoo exec completes Scripps Interactive turnaround

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Earnings season can bore, but behind some numbers, there's very human drama. Scripps, the home-and-garden media mini-empire, saw profits rise 22.8 percent to $84.1 million in the first quarter, thanks in large part to Scripps Interactive, led by former Yahoo executive Deanna Brown. Her unit swung to a profit of $21 million in the first quarter. A year ago, Scripps Interactive lost $15 million in the first quarter. At Yahoo, Brown, we had heard, choked under the rule of Yahoo media czar Scott Moore, whom some ex-employees called "suffocating." At the time, Brown only told us, "Sorry, not going to get into this." How politic. Numbers speak louder than words, at any rate.

Yahoo newspaper consortium good enough for Scripps

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:21:34 EST

E.W. Scripps COO Rich Boehne told a conference yesterday that Yahoo's HotJobs.com will account for as much as 5 percent of its newspaper revenues in 2008. That merely confirms what we've heard: The classifieds jobs site is the only part of Yahoo's newspaper consortium that's working. And that's likely because Yahoo bought HotJobs instead of trying to build it. HotJobs isn't the reason why Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, MediaNews, and Cox Newspapers are starting up their own one-stop shop for online advertising — it's the rest of Yahoo's unfulfilled promises. (Photo by Gastev)

Scripps to sell its search engine

Owen Thomas — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:10:46 EST

Scripps, having spent $525 million to acquire the Shopzilla product search engine in 2005, is now looking to unload it on a new owner for about the same amount. CEO Kenneth Lowe, the mastermind of both the HGTV cable channel and the Shopzilla deal, wasn't able to do much with this online fixer-upper. Scripps saw its interactive revenues and profits drop in the most recent quarter.

Scripps dumps newspapers and broadcast TV

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:49:13 EDT

Scripps, the cable-TV, newspaper, and Web conglomerate, will split into two publicly traded companies, its board announced today. Scripps Networks Interactive gets the growing cable-TV channels, including HGTV, and all the Internet properties. E. W. Scripps gets stuck with 10 broadcast television stations and newspapers in 17 U.S. markets. The lucky Kenneth Lowe, Scripps' current CEO, will keep running Scripps Networks. And in the worst loss ever recorded for a rock-paper-scissors game, Richard Boehne gets to helm the company slated to be destroyed by YouTube and Craigslist. (Photo by neurmadic aesthetic)

Scripps gets into a user-generated Pickle

Mary Jane Irwin — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:29:33 EDT

Do you guys not wear sandals in the locker rooms? The Scripps Network, having repeatedly scratched its Web 2.0 itch before, finds itself still afflicted. It's looking to spice up recent acquisition Recipezaar with an infusion of what we at Valleywag like to call loser-generated content. The current ingredient of choice is Incando, the maker of personal media-sharing site Pickle, a mashup of Flickr and YouTube. Scripps hopes to spread Pickle across its network of home and garden websites, allowing user-created content to account for 50 percent of its content one day. Figures. Scripps TV programming is all about do-it-yourself, after all.