How bad are newspaper valuations?

McClatchy has written down the value of its investment in Seattle to less than $10M, for a slightly less than 50% stake. It originally valued the investment at over $100M a mere 2 years ago.

What's particularly important here is these numbers are based on a projection of future cashflows and asset values, not merely on public comparables. What that means is MNI spent time projecting the future of the business, and they came to the conclusion that there's about $20M left in the old dog. There are discount factors applied here, such that $1M in future years is worth less than $1M now, like a sort of reverse interest, but even so that's not a lot for a paper in a top market...

Even more importantly, they also chose to writedown part of their investment in Classified Ventures by about 14%. This would value all of CV at around $334M, certainly nothing to shake a stick at, but I had heard people estimating cars.com alone at about $1B during the 2006 peak.