Reed gets out of town

I got a phone call early this morning from France about Reed selling off its business pub and exhibition units but Brian Fuller beat me to the announcement. This is really big. Reed already announced they were going to layoff a couple thousand people worldwide, Mike Santarini and Maury Wright part of that. But this move says they see the writing on the wall for B2B journalism as it is traditionally done. It's as profitable as it will ever be.



While this whole thing may be worth more than $2 billion, I'm not sure they are going to get that kind of price right now. Some of it could be valuable to CMP, if nothing else but to eliminate competition. But as CMP goes deeper into exhibition and webcasting, some of what Reed offers could be very valuable. I'm wondering if Advantage and NewsCorp might also get into the mix.

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