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FOURTH QUARTER, FULL 2004 RESULTS IN: NOT BAD; NOT GOOD Nine pubic publishers report; GCI has record-setting year.

Article Excerpt
"It was a very good year." -- Frank Sinatra, not necessarily singing about newspapers

Like the bands of American soldiers trying to deny the fact they're stranded on an island with bands of Japanese soldiers in another Sinatra vehicle -- the 1965 movie None But The Brave -- newspaper publishers last week tried to put the best face on their dilemma that they could. Revealing both fourth-quarter and year-end earnings and results for 2004, nine of the 13 publicly traded newspaper companies had mostly good things to say, though there were some obvious shortcomings in the reports. By the numbers:

*Dow Jones & Co. Inc.: Special items -- those one-time accounting miracles that can make or break an income statement -- made the fourth quarter of 2003 look particularly good (or the fourth quarter of 2004 look particularly bad, depending upon your point of view).

So, when you get rid of the special charges and compare real net income, Dow Jones earned 43 cents per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2004 and 44 cents per diluted share in the same period the year before. But add those special items in, and 2003 had 54 cents per share in the fourth quarter.

For the full year, earnings per share were $1.21 versus $2.08 in 2003 -- but those special items really inflated that number and when you take them out, the 2003 EPS was 96 cents, which means that the full year EPS was up 26 percent over 2003.

Ad revenue in the fourth quarter was up one percent, to $251.6 million, and for the full year it was up 8.6 percent, to $946.3 million.

The big percentage-gainer for DJ was its information services division, whose fourth quarter income increased almost 19 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2003, and whose year-over-year income was up almost 15 percent over 2003, though those increases came "largely due to acquisitions."

Ad volume in the fourth quarter at the company's flagship Wall Street Journal was down 5.1 percent against 2003 and it was flat when comparing the full year 2003 to the full year 2004. The only bright spot...