DAVENPORT, Iowa – The once high-flying investor darling Lee Enterprises, owner of the Winona Daily News, continues deep in debt, according to the company’s latest quarterly report to shareholders. Loans total $485 million. The company continued to pay unusually high 9% interest in a 2020 refinancing deal. The quarterly report spun the company’s gains in online advertising revenue, up 50% from a year earlier. The company was silent, however, on its print entities. Lee has been in trouble since the ill-timed $1.5 billion purchase of the Pulitzer metro newspaper chain in 2005 – just before the bottom fell out of the newspaper industry. Lee entered bankruptcy in 2011 but was rescued by investor Warren Buffet, Gw refinanced Lee’s 11% interest debt at 9% on condition that the company absorb several Buffet papers that were experiencing their own circulation declines.
Lee Enterprises profile
Lee publishes 75 dailies in 26 states and 350 weeklies, no-news shoppers and and one-off specialty publications. Its River Valley Group, headquartered in LaCrosse, includes dailies in Chippewa Falls, LaCrosse and Winona. All now skip publication several days a week. Corporate headquarters are in Davenport, Iowa. Major dailies, all major revenue drains, include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arizona Star and the Omaha World-Herald. In Wisconsin it owns the State Journal in Madison and the Journal Times in Racine, and the News in Kenosha.