Cramer emerges unbruised in Street fight
JIM Cramer, the perspicacious host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” and the co-founder of The Street.com, has survived an uprising by a disgruntled shareholder at his financial news company.
Cannell Capital, a fund that controls 9.47 percent of TheStreet’s common stock, tried unsuccessfully to block two Cramer-friendly board members from being re-elected.
The investor is steamed over what it believes is Cramer’s excessive $3.05-million-a-year compensation.
In aggregate, Cramer’s cash compensation is equal to 28 percent of today’s market capitalization, Cannell said in a regulatory filing.
But shareholders at last week’s annual meeting sided with The Street’s nominees over Cannell’s people.
But that doesn’t mean Cramer or his company have steered clear of turbulence.
TheStreet is facing a possible delisting on June 12 because of its stock price: Nasdaq requires that shares trade above $1 for at least 10 consecutive days. TheStreet’s stock has failed to do so over an extended period of time.
It closed on Tuesday at 90 cents, unchanged.
While it has already technically not met Nasdaq’s listing requirement, TheStreet can appeal any adverse decision — and ask for additional time to break above a buck.
If an extension is granted, TheStreet’s listing will still suffer a great embarrassment — it will be moved to Nasdaq’s JV team, called the Nasdaq Capital Market.
Cannell had called the board of TheStreet “passive” and “pathetic” for its oversight of management.
TheStreet has seen a 99 percent decline in value since its 1999 IPO.
Cannell also blasted Cramer for taking some fat fees from the struggling company.
“In 2014, 2015 and 2016, Mr. Cramer received $3.05 million per year in cash compensation and reimbursement,” it said.
Shareholders elected two incum-
bent directors — Sarah Fay and Stephen Zacharias. Fay got 14.8 million votes — while 10.9 million voted against her.
Zacharias got 15.1 million votes, while 10.6 million shares were voted to block him.
In both cases, there were just under 8 million broker nonvotes. In the latest development, Brian
Sozzi was appointed acting editor following the resignation last month of Editor-in-Chief Tara Murphy after only seven months in the top spot.
Not so Breit
Ad volume in April and May plunged at Breitbart News, the site founded by Steve Bannon, now a top adviser to President Trump.
That’s a reversal from the first quarter, when a post-election surge saw ad revenue at the site grow, according to MediaRadar, which tracks ad spending.
MediaRadar determined that the number of advertisers on Breitbart declined by 90 percent since March 31.
Breitbart was found to have benefitted from programmatic advertising — which uses algorithms and price info to make ad buys automatically based on demographic audiences reached.
“At the peak, they carried 242 brands in March,” MediaRadar reported Tuesday. “But this stopped in April and the number of brands declined sharply.”
In April, 70 brands ran ads on the site — and that number dropped to 26 in May, it reported.
Breitbart was not the only conservative news site that saw a decrease in advertisers. MediaRadar noted a “decline in many conservative sites including Townhall, TheBlaze and National Review” — but says declines on those sites are much less pronounced than on Breitbart.
Oh-so-relevant
“Kennedy and King” by
ven Levingston has a 50,000-copy first printing — and some industry observers are already picking it to turn into one of the hot political books of a long, tumultuous summer, particularly among readers nostalgic for the New Frontier liberalism.
The Hachette Books tome carries the subtitle “The President, the Pastor and the Battle over Civil Rights.”
On Monday, as the book hit stores, Levingston was feted at a book party in the Greenwich Village pad of for- mer ad agency top executive Mary
Lou Quinlan, once dubbed the “Oprah Winfrey of Madison Avenue,” and her husband, former Time Inc. TV president Joe Quinlan.
Levingston was telling guests he thinks the sparring and the grudging partnership that evolved between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. has important lessons for today’s political world.
“‘Kennedy and King’ is about the complicated relationship between two icons but it’s not dusty history,” he said. “It’s relevant today because it tackles issues of moral courage, conscience, empathy and fidelity to American values — all now more important p than ever.” “It also portrays a tale of people speaking truth to power and, significantly in Kennedy’s case, power listening and learning and changing the world. This is a lesson as pertinent now as it ever was.” Levingston said he worked on the book for about two years, and that it grew out of what he discovered about JFK while writing an earlier e-book about the birth and tragic death of Patrick Kennedy, John and Jackie’s third child, born in August 1963.