Numbers don’t lie. DallasNews CEO Grant Moise made $1.4 million last year and $1.2 million in 2021. On an operating basis, the company lost $10 million in 2021 and $9 million last year. The DallasNews share price has been decimated, and the company’s market cap has fallen to $24 million, against last year’s revenue of $151 million—a remarkably low ratio. DallasNews’s cash and short-term investments at the end of the first quarter were $25.8 million, or more than the company’s market value. (These are America’s 25 dying industries.)
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Results for the first quarter of 2023 were just as poor as for 2022. The DallasNews operating loss was $2.7 million, compared to $2.5 million in the same quarter the year before. Moise did say he had found someone to lead Medium Giant, an operation that is not well defined. It is the only business the company owns beyond the Dallas Morning News.
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DallasNews management has made a great deal of its full-service agency, Medium Giant. The division is not broken out in the P&L. There is no way to determine whether it is successful. In a recent SEC filing, management wrote, “In 2022 Medium Giant retained 84 percent of its top 25 marketing services clients, which is notable because it means we are helping them reach their marketing goals.” Without revenue, the statement means little.
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The fate of DallasNews is in the hands of its controlling shareholder, Robert W. Decherd, who owns 92% of the Series B shares. (Dechert recently stepped down as executive board chair, and John A. Beckert took the position of non-executive chair.) Moise owns only 6,308 shares (less than 1%), showing the extent of his desire to own part of his corporation. No other board members have significant stock ownership. Directors make $105,000 a year to attend four meetings.
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Decherd should take care of the company’s other shareholders properly. DallasNews can be sold with balance sheet adjustments for more than its market value. The stock has almost no chance to trade above its 52-week high. Management pay is shockingly high. DallasNews is too small to be an independent media company, particularly when it has to compensate its CEO $1.4 million to preside over a series of financial report failures.
DallasNews CEO Makes Over $1 Million as Company Craters
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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