Two stories in the past week from New York focus the story of what's happening to newsmedia... and they're both about real estate.

There's the high-profile news of Tribune Publishing's closure of its New York Daily News newsroom, amid complicated and hard-to-understand moves which include a 'poison pill' strategy.

And there's the decision by Advance Publications to leave the location, if not the locality in which S.I. Newhouse put down his carpet-bag, after buying the Staten Island Advance in 1922 and some 14 years after going to work for its owner.

A daily newspaper - once one of the largest in the country - without a newsroom? The historic and spiritual home of what has become a huge publishing empire "no longer needed"?

We wrote about Advance in 2014 when one of the most technically-sophisticated offset newspaper presses, the partly Chinese-developed Goss Magnum Compact was being shoehorned into the basement of the Fingerboard Road premises the company had built and extended over the years.

There's a story that Newhouse ran the business from a brown leather suitcase, with all the figures in his head. By the time it was installing the Magnum Compact - the world's first, using computer technology to switch from one set of printing plates to the next, one newspaper to the next, in seconds - Advance had become a huge business with interests in cable and digital, not to mention fashion publisher Condé Nast, and was America's 53rd largest company.

Times change, and while brands including Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Wired and Vanity Fair retain their cachet, turning a dollar had become harder before the COVID-19 hit. Executive editor of the Staten Island Advance and its SILive.com stablemate Brian Laline blames the US financial meltdown of 2007-2008 and the internet, perhaps also their practice of making digital news available free... but no doubt there's more he would add to the list.

Print is being moved to a plant in New Jersey however, and Laline is at pains to stress that both the newspaper and its digital editions will continue.

Over in Lower Manhattan, they'd also be blaming the internet - and probably digital giants such as Google and Facebook - for their difficulties, as well, of course the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as neighbours wouldn't have helped, especially with the success of their paywalls. In 2020, three daily print newspapers may also be oversupply, even if one is pro-Trump, another anti-Trump, and the third... is the New York Times.

It would once have been incredible that a daily paper could be produced without a newsroom - Tribune is also vacating premises at four other mastheads - but that's pretty much what a lot of publishers have been doing with the work-from-home routines of recent months. With advertising and other revenue depleted, tapping surplus real estate is another popular ploy, whether it's by centralising print facilities or doing away with any office building not already sold.

Tribune has the added complication of its ownership, 32 per cent by private equity fund Alden Global Capital and 25 per cent by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times and a research company poised at the cusp of a major COVID vaccine development. A 'poison pill' strategy attracting attention and curiosity to Tribune, could even be a way of picking winners.

And while the move from 4 New York Plaza is permanent, the New York Daily News - if it survives post-COVID - would then be looking for a new home. Tribune has been variously quoted that it will "reconsider its need" for offices as the pandemic progresses.

We hope it does: The paper on which Superman's Daily Planet was modelled has had its financial troubles for years, with Tribune Publishing (then Tronc) buying it in 2017 for US$1 from developer Mortimer Zuckerman, who had in turn bought it out of bankruptcy 24 years before.

The 'poison pill' rights agreement strategy at the end of July came after Alden co-founder Randall Smith joined the Tribune Publishing board - bringing their total to seven seats - and is seen as some protection against a hostile takeover.

Wikipedia tells that when printer John Crawford and businessman James Kennedy launched the Richmond County Advance in 1886, the number of daily newspapers in the New York borough ran into double figures.

Its success was by growing circulation - from 4500 in 1910 to more than 80,000 in the 1990s - but Newhouse's ploy was to back a newsstand entrepreneur and, when everyone else's money ran out during the Great Depression of the 1930s, keep on buying newspapers (Conde Nast, he reputedly bought as an anniversary present for his wife).

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and money runs tight, new related media opportunities will arise for those with the cash and the foresight to take them. It would be a shame therefore, if proceeds from significant property liquidations such as these were not turned to good use - and I guess, survival would have to qualify - rather than simply be returned to speculative shareholders.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Sunset over New York Plaza (photo Google, Sarah Waldie)