Landmark Communications

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Landmark Communications

Type	Private
Genre	Media
Founded
Founder	Frank Batten
Headquarters	150 W. Brambleton Avenue Norfolk, Virginia 23510-2075
Website	www.landmarkcom.com

Landmark Communications is a privately held media company headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia and specializing in cable television, broadcast television, print publishing, and internet publishing. In addition to publishing, it has subsidiaries in what Landmark characterizes as "emerging businesses" that include database marketing, career education and trade shows.

1 Properties
2 Former properties
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Properties

In early 2008 Landmark Communications announced it was exploring the option to sell all its holdings. Landmark's best-known media outlet is The Weather Channel. The Weather Channel, located in Atlanta, could sell as early as the Summer of 2008 for around $5 Billion. Two separate investment firms, JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers, were hired to help with the sale of The Weather Channel and the newspapers. Landmark employs approximately 9000 people. The probability that one buyer will purchase the entire Landmark holdings are low.

In addition to The Weather Channel, Landmark owns the following weather properties:

weather.com
Weather Services International - [1]

Landmark owns and is selling four major daily newspapers:

The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Virginia
The Roanoke Times, Roanoke, Virginia
News & Record, Greensboro, North Carolina
The Annapolis Capital, Annapolis, Maryland [2]

Through its Landmark Community Newspapers subsidiary, it owns and is selling five community daily newspapers:

The Carroll County Times, Westminster, Maryland
Citrus County Chronicle, Crystal River, Florida
The News-Enterprise, Elizabethtown, Kentucky
Los Alamos Monitor, Los Alamos, New Mexico
Las Vegas Optic, Las Vegas, New Mexico

It also owns and is selling over 120 community and special-interest newspapers in sixteen states. This includes seven publications that cover college sports at Florida State University, University of Florida, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska, University of Kentucky, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Landmark owns and is selling three broadcast outlets:

Landmark is also part-owner (with Pelmorex) of Canadian weather channels The Weather Network and MétéoMédia. A second cable outlet, The Travel Channel was owned by the company from 1990 to 1996, when it was sold to Paxson Communications, who subsequently sold it to Discovery Communications, who subsequently sold it to Cox Communications.

Landmark also owns Continental Broadband, one of the leading providers of data center (colocation) and managed data network services in the United States. Continental Broadband has seven business units:

DataPoint http://www.datapointinc.com, Baltimore, Maryland
Expedient http://www.expedient.com, three locations in Boston, Pittsburgh and Cleveland
ANET http://www.anet.com, Chicago, Illinois
nFrame http://www.nframe.com, Indianapolis, Indiana
NET Telcos http://www.nettelcos.com, Richmond, Virginia

It owns four career training schools that focus on health-related career education:

Glendale Career College
Certified Careers Institute
Nevada Career Institute
Virginia Career Institute

[edit] Former properties

Landmark formerly owned WFMY-TV, Greensboro, North Carolina and WTAR-TV (now WTKR) Norfolk, Virginia, but was forced by FCC crossownership rules to sell both stations in the 1970s. Under the rule, Landmark could not own both a newspaper and a television station in those markets. Landmark also used to own the Washingtonian Magazine, until its rights were traded to Eleanor Merrill, widow of publisher Philip Merrill, in a trade for ownership of the Annapolis Capital newspaper. [3]

In addition, Landmark was a former owner of KNTV in San Jose, California (now an NBC owned-and-operated station, serving the San Francisco Bay Area media market). During Landmark's twelve-year ownership of the station (which lasted from 1978 to 1990), KNTV (affiliated with ABC and serving the Monterey / Salinas media market at the time) was its only station that was not an affiliate of the CBS network.

On September 19th 2007, it was announced that Continental Broadband, a Landmark Communications Company, sold its South Florida Business Unit, WebUnited to Host.net[4], the leading provider of data center (colocation) and managed network services in Florida.[5]

On January 3, 2008, it was reported that the entire Landmark Communications company may be for sale.^[1]