Gannett: Rumored Deal with New Media

Gannett (GCI) is the publisher of the USA Today and about one hundred other midsized and smaller daily publications, newspapers are clearly in secular decline and have been for some time.  Newspaper publishing is an industry that went through a period several years back when there was a trend of spinning off the newspaper business from TV broadcasting or other media businesses (current GCI was a spinoff of the original Gannett that was renamed TEGNA).  I participated in several of those breakups and was lucky to make a little bit of money despite the backdrop of the industry, so why not give it another try with two companies I've written about previously potentially merging.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that New Media Investment Corp (NEWM) was in talks to purchase Gannett in a cash-and-stock deal.  New Media is similar to Gannett, just without the USA Today, they own a bunch of small town newspapers and a couple midsized ones.  New Media is externally managed by Fortress Investment Group (now owned by Softbank), NEWM is one of the few operating businesses (non-REIT/BDCs) I know of that is externally managed, it was a spinoff of Newcastle (now Drive Shack) originating as the result of Fortress buying the debt of local newspaper publisher GateHouse Media (the entity WSJ references as the buyer) within Newcastle and later taking control of the post-reorg GateHouse.  Fortress has since used New Media as a vehicle to roll-up the distressed local newspaper industry at low single digit EBITDA multiples and then pay an out sized dividend to attract retail investors (standard externally managed playbook type stuff).

This deal has a hint of HPT buying SMTA's master trust to it, Fortress gets paid a management fee of 1.5% off of New Media's equity, Gannett is a low-quality asset but represents a way for Fortress to roughly double their management fee with one of the last large willing sellers (the other publishers are mostly controlled/family owned) at a price that both could claim victory with given the synergies at stake.  As an asset gatherer, New Media will be aggressive in pursuing Gannett and will likely get a deal done.

As a little recent background on Gannett, earlier this year they fended off a hostile takeover and later a proxy fight from PE owned MNG Enterprises (dba "Digital First Media"), the owner of the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News among other publications.  MNG Enterprises offered $12 per share for GCI (currently trades at ~$9.60) but the hostile bid and lack of committed financing led Gannett management to dig in their heels and resist the effort.  While this was happening, Gannett's CEO stepped down in May and the company has been without a named successor since.

How could this be a win for all three parties (Fortress, New Media, Gannett)?  The Wall Street Journal references $200MM of potential synergies being discussed in the deal, which sounds like a lot compared to Gannett's $290MM EBITDA guidance for 2019, and it is, but there is a lot of overlap between the two's footprint and $200MM is roughly 25% of Gannett's run rate G&A expenses, I think there is some reasonableness to the synergy number that a PE manager could extract from the operations.  New Media's stated acquisition criteria is to buy publishing assets at 3.5x-4.5x EBITDA, GCI trades for 5.6x standalone EBITDA of $290MM (mid-point of 2019 management guidance).

New Media can buy Gannett for "4x EBITDA" using a post-synergy number of $490MM and all three parties can claim victory: 

1. Fortress gets to roughly double their management fee; 
2. New Media gets a large acquisition within their stated price target to bleed for continued dividend yield, and given NEWM trades at a premium to the industry (due to the high dividend yield) it would be accretive to shareholders; 
3. Gannett gets a higher price with credible financing than what they turned down earlier this year justifying their actions

Speaking of financing, New Media's debt is primarily a term loan that is owned by CLOs.  The leveraged loan industry is under a microscope at the moment, primary issuance is down considerably year-over-year as investors prepare for lower interest rates (loans are floating rate products) and loan mutual funds have seen 30+ months of outflows.  However the demand for CLOs has kept a strong bid under loans and have essentially created forced buying of risky debt.  New Media is already a familiar name and present in dozens of CLOs, they could presumably finance a bid for Gannett through this channel.  Fortress is a strong PE sponsor and an active CLO manager in their own right.

So how might a cash-and-stock deal look like?  New Media has conventional debt of $450MM against a $180MM LTM EBITDA, or 2.5x levered, if they added the $490MM (let's save EBITDA addback math for another time) and kept leverage roughly the same they could raise enough financing to pay $6-7/share in cash and then issue the rest in NEWM stock.  I'm also including Gannett's pension shortfall in EV, NEWM likes to exclude their capital leases and pension liability from their leverage numbers so maybe they could justify paying on the higher side of my back-of-the-envelope estimates.  Anyway, I think this deal crosses the finish line as Gannett is floundering and doesn't have a controlling shareholder, New Media wants to gather additional assets for its external manager, it's a win-win for a dying industry.

Disclosure: I own shares GCI (and a few calls as well)

Journal Media Group: Sold to Gannett

Two of the (very) recent publishing spinoffs are going to continue the industry's consolidation trend; Gannett (GCI) announced last night the purchase of Journal Media Group (JMG) for $12/share in cash for nearly a 50% premium.  The purchase price values Journal Media at around ~6x my swag of EBITDA.  I previously mentioned that Journal Media made a natural acquisition target for Gannett before it was spun out of the Scripps/Journal Communications transaction back on April 1st.  Journal was setup for an acquisition with no debt, no controlling shareholder and papers that fit well into Gannett's portfolio of mid-sized city publications.  Sounds a lot like Cable ONE (CABO) which was recently spun out with the implied purpose of being acquired.

The timing of the transaction is somewhat surprising as spinoffs typically wait two years before being acquired to avoid IRS scrutiny around their tax free status.  But Journal Media has provided its former parent E.W. Scripps with an opinion reaffirming the tax free nature of the transaction.  Gannett looks a little bit cheap here, but along with New Media (NEWM) they'll be the consolidators in an industry that I don't want to hold through the next recession (whenever that might be) as advertisers move toward other platforms.  The broadcast/newspaper spinoff trade has worked out well this year, but time to close it out, I sold my shares today and will let arbitragers get the last percentage points.

Disclosure: No positions

Gannett: Familiar Publishing Spin Playbook

Continuing on a familiar trend in the legacy broadcast/publishing media space, Gannett announced in August 2014 the spinoff of their publishing business to separate the headwinds facing business from the growth broadcast and digital businesses.  The transaction structure isn't as interesting and doesn't appear to create the same inefficiencies as the SSP/JRN merger spinoff, but I think the upside opportunity is roughly the same.  Plus with Gannett, Carl Icahn owns a 6.57% stake and he will likely generate some media headlines as the spinoff nears in the next couple of months.

TEGNA
The publishing business will be the spinoff and retain the Gannett (and GCI ticker) name with the parent being awkwardly renamed TEGNA and trading under the TGNA ticker.  TEGNA will be the #1 NBC, #1 CBS, and #4 ABC independent affiliate with a total of 46 broadcast stations across 36 markets, including a big slug of Texas exposure thanks to the 2014 acquisition of 6 London Broadcasting Company stations.  The company will cover roughly 30% of U.S. households, comfortably below the 39% FCC limit allowing continued station acquisitions.

Broadcast television stations are a fairly straight forward business to analyze with many near pure play public comparables thanks to the previous deals done in the space.  The current plan is to make the publishing spinoff virtually debt free, so for the sake of a simple SOTP analysis all of the debt is going on the broadcast TV business.  Similar to the Scripps thesis, I'm going to take an average of the expected EBITDA of 2015 and 2016 to capture the election cycle revenue which can really skew off-year results.

Interestingly Scripps still looks pretty cheap and under-levered compared to peers (I sold the day or two after the transaction, continue to hold JMG).  TEGNA's broadcast business should be worth at least 9x a blended EBITDA given the attractive market profile and size which should get them leverage in upcoming retransmission and affiliate negotiations.

Along with the broadcast business, TEGNA will also include the two main Gannett digital assets in Cars.com and CareerBuilder.  Both were formed as joint ventures in the late 1990s by a consortium of newspaper publishers in an attempt to combat the rise of the internet in classified advertising, so it's odd that they'd be included with the parent over the spinoff.  Gannett purchased the 73% of Cars.com it didn't own last year for $1.7B implying a $2.5B valuation for the entire asset (or less if you want to subtract the control premium).  CareerBuilder is a little trickier to value, in the 2014 10-K, Gannett had $68MM in net income attributable to non-controlling interests, presumably the vast majority of this is the 47.1% of CareerBuilder that Gannett doesn't own.  Putting a 15x multiple on CareerBuilder net income values the company at $2.1B ($144MM NI), making Gannett's 52.9% ownership worth $1.1B.  As a double check, McClatchy owns 15% of CareerBuilder and using the equity method values the company at $1.5B.  Splitting the difference and Gannett's position in CareerBuilder is worth about $950MM.

Adding the broadcast and digital groups together I get an enterprise value of $11.77B or an equity value of $7.4B after backing out the debt (assuming virtually all of it stays with the parent).

Gannett Co (Spinoff)

The publishing company's main asset is the USA Today which is the top newspaper in the U.S. by circulation, possibly because its a staple of Holiday Inn breakfast bars all around the country.  Additionally, Gannett has over 100 local dailies in both the U.S. and U.K. which include a mix of larger papers like the Arizona Republic, Indianapolis Star, Detroit Free Press, along with other smaller community papers which are generally stickier.  Their circulation number declines have slowed, however they're still feeling declining advertising revenues as social media gains are typically at the expense of legacy media companies.  

Their current strategy is to leverage the USA Today brand/content by selling it into local newspapers and beefing up their sports coverage.  USA Today has a strong brand - everyone recognizes their red/sports, green/money, and purple/life sections - with over 70MM unique monthly readers to either their print or digital content.  I'm not sure how I missed it late last year, but Horizon Kinetics has an interesting discussion on spinoffs and specifically the recent publishing spinoffs that's worth reading.  Gannett isn't specifically touched on, but many the same parallels apply, the spinoff's challenge will be turning the low-to-negative margin business of print publishing into a higher margin digital content company that has a broader geographic reach than print.  Gannett seems to have a good mix of small community papers that can turn into local databases and the USA Today which could increase its readership through continued digital build out.

Below is the same basic list of comparables used for Journal Media Group (which could be a natural acquisition target for the new Gannett), and again all the debt is on the broadcast company for the purpose of the SOTP:

The publishing companies are valued more widely than the broadcasters, but Gannett will be clearly the largest in the space and should garner at least a 6x EBITDA multiple, or a $2.7B valuation.

Total pre-spin valuation: $7.4B (net of debt) for TEGNA and $2.7B for the new Gannett, for a total of $10.1B or roughly $44.50 per share, it's currently trading at ~$36 for a potential 23% upside.  Thanks to Carl Icahn's influence the corporate governance at both companies should be shareholder friendly, there's no controlling family like other media companies, but I see both more as acquirers in their space.  I purchased some in the money calls a few weeks ago and will be interested to see where both end up trading after the mid-2015 transaction date.

Disclosure: I'm long GCI calls