Journal Board OKs Higher Stock Price p.13

By: Mark Fitzgerald

S EXPECTED, JOURNAL Communications Inc.'s board of directors endorsed a plan to boost the company's employee-ownership stock price to 75% of market value over the next five years ? an increase designed to discourage hostile suitors for the publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In another effort to respond to such takeover bids as the $1 billion offer from an unnamed party, the 27-member Journal Communications board also formed a nine-member executive committee authorized to respond quickly to urgent corporate matters.
Journal Communications also added two new outsider directors to the board, which had had only one nonemployee director.
All the moves come as management is involved in a tug of war with an unidentified would-be buyer for the support of the company's employee-owners.
Christopher Shaw, the New York City-based media broker, says he represents a client willing to pay as much as $1 billion for Journal Communications, a 6,000-employee company with publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications, printing, database marketing and software services operations in 17 states and Europe.
That offer amounts to about $72 a share, or almost exactly double the $35.92 a share unit price that Journal Communications set for the first week of September.