Western import expected for Daily News spot

WITH Daily News exec Artie Browne ready to retire as editor-in-chief and publisher at year’s end, rumors are swirling about a successor.

Most expect Tronc Chairman Michael Ferro to dispatch his own replacement from Chicago to rescue the teetering tabloid.

Browne is said to be pushing for Jim Gaines, the former top editor at People and Time, who is on board at the News as enterprise editor. Another insider, Rob Moore, managing editor of news, is also said to be angling to move up the masthead.

But the bet is that News insiders will be disappointed.

Sources close to the situation said there has already been talk of putting Jim Kirk, the former editor & publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, into the role on a temporary basis.

Kirk was most recently the acting interim executive editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Tronc is already reaching eastward from Chicago to implement some changes.

Jeff Zomper, the senior vice president of human resources — labeled the “axman” by many of the Daily News reporters fired over the past several years — also left recently.

The changes are expected to accelerate in the new year as Tronc assumes greater control and tries to stanch the red ink.

Ball & chain

The new regime will have its work cut out for it.

The Daily News would have dragged its new parent company into a loss if it had been under the Tronc umbrella during the first half of the year, securities filings indicate.

Tronc revealed late on Monday that, in the first half of 2017 ending on June 25, the Daily News posted a net loss of $13.9 million on revenue of $63.6 million.

The latest numbers suggest the News’ financial picture is worsening. Last year, the paper lost $23.7 million in the full year of 2016 on revenue of $144 million.

Less than three months ago, the News was still owned by real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who picked up the paper out of bankruptcy in 1993 and sold it to Tronc for $1 on Sept. 3.

Tronc, owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and several other papers, reported net income of $3.9 million on revenue of $735.9 million in the six months ended June 25, when it was operating without the News anchor.

If the two companies had already merged in the first half, the pro forma results would have been revenue of $799.5 million and a net income loss of $4.3 million.

Print and digital are both tumbling this year for the News.

Paid print circulation Monday to Friday in the second quarter of 2017 was only 182,472 copies per day, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

And the News is not making up any of its lost circulation from its Web site.

Web traffic for October had skid- ded to 23.3 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore, down from the 28.2 million unique monthly visitors a year earlier.

Still Time

Time Inc.’s top management huddled with a number of major shareholders on Nov. 16, and one source said he came away convinced management was still committed to a long-term turnaround plan — not the takeover plan that Meredith is floating.

“There still seems a little bit of resistance” to the idea of selling the company, the source said.

That may be one reason Time Inc.’s stock seems to have stalled without piercing the $17-a share offer.

A week ago, the buzz was that a deal was imminent.

But now some on Wall Street are taking a more cautious approach. The stock on Tuesday closed at $16.50 a share, down 5 cents on the day.

That ends a rally that began with the company’s earnings report in premarket on Nov. 9 and accelerated when news broke that Meredith — with $500 million in backing from billionaire brothers Charles Koch and David Koch — was circling the company for the third time with an offer that could be between $1.7 billion and $2 billion.

But another Wall Street source said McKinsey & Co., which has been consulting with Time for a year, is urging the company board of directors to hold out for a higher price above the $17 to $20 a share that Meredith is reportedly dangling. Dozens of McKinsey management consultants are at work inside Time Inc., led by managing partner Christian Schmitz, who is the de facto chief transformation officer of the company. Meanwhile, one shareholder asked, “Are the Time properties sufficiently iconic that there will be other interested parties?”

“The only way you get a good price is when more than one party wants the same thing,” said the shareholder.

So far, no other suitors for the media property have been revealed.