An article in today’s AdAge puts the source of today’s newspaper woes not on the economy but on the newspapers’ owners.

If you analyze newspapers’ earnings, you’ll find that most are still making money and even decent margins, writer Nat Ives explained.

Publicly owned newspapers averaged an operating profit of 10.8 percent in the first three quarters of last year, Ives reported. And while that’s clearly not the margin enjoyed by newspapers when they were monopolies, “it’s not nothing.”

And demand isn’t down either. At least on the Web, traffic is growing.

The problems stem from the debt newspaper owners took on based on projections that didn’t pan out.

Ives takes a look at Lee Enterprises, which reported an $889 million net loss for the 12 months ended Sept. 28. Its loss primarily reflected a huge accounting write-down as the company adjusted its estimated value.

But it’s important to point that it’s not that “$889 million of cash flowed from the coffers just to make payroll and keep the presses running,” Ives wrote. In fact, if you strip out the accounting charge to look at the real dollars Lee papers collected and spent, its operating profit for those 12 months topped 20 percent.

McClatchy, too, is looking to make another $100 million in budget cuts as it struggles under more than $2 billion in debt, much of which it assumed in 2006 to buy Knight Ridder.

But look past the interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and charges such as severance, Ives said, and McClatchy’s underlying newspaper portfolio just delivered a 21.5 percent operating profit margin.

Gannett is similar. The company had an 18 percent profit margin last year. Scripps? 9.8 percent. Even the newspapers owned by Tribune returned a modest 5.4 percent operating profit in the first three quarters of last year.

When the recession is over, will newspapers recapture lost advertising revenues? They did during previous recoveries. But in the new digital age, that’s no longer a certainty.

What is for sure, Ives said, is that many of today’s newspaper owners won’t be there in the next few years.

Side note:

Two more newspaper owners have thrown themselves to the mercies of bankruptcy court: Philadelphia Newspapers (publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News), and The Journal Register Cos., publisher of The Trentonian in New Jersey and The New Haven Register in Connecticut.

What’s important to note is that Brian Tierney, CEO of Philadelphia Newspapers, commented on the bankruptcy that “This restructuring is focused solely on our debt, not our operations. Our operations are sound and profitable.”

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