Daily Loaf

This week, life threw a massive curve ball at Creative Loafing Media. Taken over by the NYC-based hedge fund to whom we owed a ton of money, each employee processed the news in a different way: sadness, optimism, relief. Me? I got shit-faced. On great wine. I figured if my family’s legacy is going down [my parents founded Creative Loafing and my brother was CEO until last Tuesday], I should consume voluminous amounts of quality juice. Fast. However, the questioned remained … which ones? So many choices, so little time to race and get to the promised land.

Obviously, I needed something high in alcohol. These sorts of wines emerge from hot areas, where the grapes grow fat with sugar and the resulting wine has more punch (sugar converts to alcohol in fermentation). Napa, Sonoma, Barossa Valley (Australia), Washington State (yes, there are areas where it isn’t miserably rainy), and a host of other delicious choices for the perfect Zen state of non-thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Atalaya Capital Management this morning doubled Creative Loafing Management’s bid to retain the alternative newsweekly chain, ending months of legal wrangling and 37 years of control by the Eason family.

Michael Bogdan, managing partner of the winning New York-based hedge fund, said he is committed to keeping the chain’s 230 employees and 400,000 readers in six cities.

“We are here for the long haul and we want to make this work,” Bogdan said minutes after Federal Bankruptcy Judge Caryl E. Delano accepted Atalaya’s $5 million cash bid.

Creative Loafing bid $2.32 million in cash and other securities. The deal is expected to close within 10 days.

Bogdan and other Atalaya officials are tentatively set to meet Wednesday morning at the Marriott Waterside with publishers and other managers from the papers in Tampa, Sarasota, Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Read the rest of this entry »

During a conference call this morning, Creative Loafing President Ben Eason and COO Kirk MacDonald told managers at the six papers in the CL chain (CL Tampa, Sarasota, Atlanta and Charlotte, the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper) that their salaries are going to be cut in the range of 5%-15%, effective the first payroll period in April. Eason and MacDonald will take the biggest cuts. City Paper Editor Eric Wemple expressed gratitude during the call that the company had decided to go this route instead of laying off any more staff. (Here’s his post, live-blogged during the call.) In Tampa, in addition to the salary reductions at the corporate level, the paper’s publisher, ad director and editor — that’s me — will be taking cuts.

MacDonald explained the cuts as a reaction to declining ad revenues. In this climate, he said, “the cost structure at all media companies, including ours, is too high.” Creative Loafing filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last October, and is in the midst of reorganization; Eason expressed confidence that the company will emerge from bankruptcy by late summer.

Meanwhile, Tampa’s paper has something to celebrate. Preliminary financials for the month of February show the paper breaking even after a stretch of losses, and traffic to the paper’s website has markedly increased since a redesign was introduced in mid-January.

So, with good bad news and good good news at hand, CL Tampa is throwing a party. We’ll be formally launching the new site tonight at an Open House at the CL offices from 6-8 p.m. Meet the CL staff, talk with our new team of bloggers and have a drink on us.