Cliffs Shake-up, Schneider Break-up, and a Surprising Website Breakdown

CLIFFS NATURAL RESOURCES is preparing for a potentially nasty and climactic shareholders meeting and vote on July 29th.

Casablanca Capital, the activist hedge fund which owns about 5% of Cliffs, is essentially attempting a coup of the company. It's putting up its own, hostile slate of candidates for the Cliffs board of directors.

If it wins the board vote, Casablanca would likely fire the CEO, radically change the company strategy and divest some of Cliffs international operations.

Cliffs, for its part, calls the Casablanca candidates inexperienced. It's attempted to appease Casablanca by offering the hedge fund a few slots on the board of directors, but Casablanca has rejected the compromise. It wants control of the company. It blames current Cliffs management for failed strategies, excessive salaries and plummeting stock prices.

How much of a plummet? How about a share price of $99.86 on July 22, 2011...and a share price of, oh, about $15 or so today. Quick math tells you that's an 85% slide in three years.

Worse news: there's nothing to indicate that iron ore prices worldwide are going up anytime soon. If anything, they may continue to decline.

Worse, worse news: a law firm has just filed a class action suit against Cliffs for allegedly misrepresenting itself to investors and misleading them about the company's financial condition.
------------------------------------------

IF JASON SCHNEIDER, the former City Commissioner and current County Commission candidate,  had intended to botch his exit from his job at Accelerate UP and to sully his otherwise sterling reputation, he succeeded in admirable fashion.

For the last fifteen months, Schneider, with funding from the Lundin Foundation (yeah, the mining company), has been helping young businesses get on their feet with the aid of other established businesses in the community. By all accounts, he's done a wonderful job, and he, himself, has nothing but praise for Lundin and its role in supporting him.

Problem is, the Accelerate UP board of directors told him back in May it didn't like the idea of him running for county commission because it didn't like to mix politics with business. You can disagree with that logic--and many of us do--but the fact is, he was told back then that if and when he won the commission seat, he'd have to resign from Accelerate UP.

If he'd been so upset about the ultimatum, he should have resigned right then and there. That would have been the principled thing to do.

But Schneider chose not to resign then. Instead, he decided to wait for a couple of months before suddenly announcing his resignation last week. He informed his board of his decision by email...and then one hour later, notified the media. Soon thereafter, he then told all his friends on Facebook about his decision.

At worst, it sounds like a publicity stunt designed to gain sympathy and votes a few weeks before the election. At best, it was an unfortunate, ill-timed move by a novice politician.

Oh well. But what's more baffling is why he didn't continue working his  job helping entrepreneurs until the election came around. If he were to lose the election (he's up against incumbent Bruce Heikkila), Lundin had told him he would keep the job and continue his good work.

You also have to ask yourself: Which is more valuable? A fulltime job helping struggling, young businesses? Or a parttime job as a county commissioner?

Yeah, we'll hear all about "principles" and the big, bad mining company and the backroom conspiracies, etc but the fact is, a good man doing a good job took a messy way out when he didn't have to. And Marquette County is the worse for it.
-------------------------------------------

NUMBERS CAN LIE, and frequently do.

But here are some numbers that might force the local television industry to sit up and take notice:

TV6 in May reported 2.5 million page views on its website (impressive, a tenfold increase over just ten years ago).

But ABC 10 in June reported...(drum roll, please)...2.7 million page views.

What???

Okay, time for caveats. First, it is two different months but that shouldn't have made that much of a difference. And second, it's two different companies calculating the monthly analytics reports so maybe it's not quite apples to apples.

But still.

TV6 has long been the overwhelmingly dominant station here--its newscast numbers dwarf those of ABC 10 and TV 3 (the newcomer to the game). But online, ABC 10 apparently has been making huge strides. It does have a remarkably active social media presence.

It still seems hard to believe, because the TV6 website remains robust and ever-alert to breaking news and it's got many more reporter-contributors than ABC 10 does.

Let's see what shakes out in the months ahead. Maybe these latest numbers are just an anomaly. And yes, sometimes numbers do lie.


You got news? Email me at briancabell@gmail.com