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9
2010 ANNUAL REPORT
daily and Sunday circulation among metropoli-
tan papers.
2011 will not be an easy year (there are no easy
years in the newspaper business). The large
cuts of 2010 can’t be repeated, and we don’t
expect a rebound in print revenue.
Meanwhile, the corporate digital team, under
Vijay Ravindran, has come up with a remark-
able new news site, Trove, which we expect to
be public by the end of the first quarter. I am
very excited by Trove’s potential; depending
on its success, we’ll try to integrate some of
its features into washingtonpost.com. And, we
have a road map of impressive new capabilities
that will be launched as part of the Trove initia-
tive throughout 2011.
In addition, together with Gannett and The
New York Times Company, we’ve invested in
another innovative news site, Ongo, a uniquely
handsome aggregation of quality news sites
that made its debut in early 2011. Ongo will give
us our first exposure to operating a paid site. It
will be a busy year in digital innovation.
Post–Newsweek Stations turned in an amaz-
ing year. Results were far better than I would
have predicted: in ad revenue relative to
2009—a terrible year—our stations stood out
as a group. We were helped by strong politi-
cal advertising in all the states we operate in,
but the pre-election period was great, as well.
PNS’s performance was the largest financial
surprise of 2010.
Post–Newsweek CEO Alan Frank and all six
station managers deserve the thanks of all
our shareholders. A non-election year in 2011
probably means lower revenue and profits
this year (although the stations are o to a
strong start).
Once again, the astonishing Cable ONE team,
under Tom Might, Julie Laulis, Jerry McKenna
and Steve Fox, adapted to rapidly changing
industry circumstances and turned in a strong
year, both in unit counts and in terms of cus-
tomer satisfaction.
The ground is changing rapidly in the cable
business. Cable ONE serves small-city markets,
with an average of 15,000 to 20,000 subscrib-
ers. These customers have had the choice of
satellite for 20 years, but additional options
from telephone companies and Internet sources
are increasingly available now, too.
As the competitive world changes, Tom and
his team have steered skillfully, oering more
choices and embellishing Cable ONE’s out-
standing customer-service record. (When is
the last time you heard a cable company
bragging about that?) Operating income
and free cash flow in 2010 were close to an
all-time high.
This will not be the case in 2011 for two rea-
sons. First, we will be heavying up on capital
spending to increase our HD channel capacity
and Inter net speeds. Second, we started pur-
suing a market-share strategy in the second