Editor & Publisher: GateHouse CEO making waves

In this area, GateHouse Media has been best known recently for its decision to shut down its fledgling Joplin Daily newspaper/website, but in the business world, the company and its CEO Michael Reed (who at one time was CEO for Joplin Globe owner Community Newspapers Holding, Inc.), have been rapidly establishing themselves as a forces to be reckoned with in the newspaper world.
The company's success ie explored in an article posted this week on the Editor & Publisher website:

GateHouse had a simple message during its "road shows" leading to the public offering: Community papers don't face the secular pressures pounding at metro newspapers; revenues will grow with aggressive acquisitions and by pumping up its previously modest Web operations -- and huge proportions of that free cash flow will be returned to stockholders in dividends with yields that are triple the average for publicly held newspaper companies.

"Investors were supportive of the business model, and what we see for the future -- and, of course, the dividend play," Reed says.

As it turned out, investors who were first skeptical, even bewildered, by the GateHouse IPO proposal came to embrace it. On its first day of trading, shares opened on the top of its forecast $16 to $18 per-share range, and jumped 17.5% to $21.16. (By early January, the share price had settled into an $18- to-$19 range.)

In this area, of course, GateHouse owns The Carthage Press, The Neosho Daily News, the Neosho Post, and the Big Nickel.