One could argue that media organizations with radio and TV stations shouldn’t be publicly traded companies anyway.
If you go back in history to the 1940’s, when the larger-market stations were owned primarily by large corporations such as Westinghouse, General Electric, Crosley, RCA, and NBC. All of these companies were publicly traded and all eventually shed their broadcast interests due primarily to market saturation, verses manufacturing and selling consumer electronics, appliances, etc., which had continuous growth and better operating margins.
Wall Street wants to see 2-4% gross revenue or cash-flow growth annually. As many of us have experienced, the advertising climate can go chilly quickly, and everyone is scrambling around to essentially trade listeners or viewers in a market as well. For the most part, that is exactly what stations do, trade the same audience around, so it makes it hard to grow that audience, (and advertiser base), consistently and predictably.
The other problem with communications or media companies being publicly held is the analyst factor. Media stocks as a whole take a hammering when even one Wall Street analyst or freelance stock authority decides they don’t like “traditional media”, and change one large publicly traded stock from a buy to a sell recommendation. With the exception of newspapers in the old days, media stocks have always been volatile. Fast-foward in time, and now more and more advertising is going on-line, plus reducing overall ad spending during a bad economy as the one we’re in now.
