Milwaukee Magazine thoroughly details the Journal Sentinel's thoroughly depressing stock woes

We would have told you before now to pick up a copy of this month’s Milwaukee Magazine in order to read Mary Van de Kamp Nohl’s meticulous examination of the ruinous state of the Journal Sentinel’s stock value, but does anybody honestly know where you can buy Milwaukee Magazine? Do they actually sell it in Milwaukee, or do we have to hunt down a Borders in Mequon to find this thing? At any rate, Van de Kamp Nohl’s exhaustive “Paper Money” exposé is now online, and it’s essential reading for anyone that cares about the future of daily journalism in Milwaukee or just likes rubber-necking at incredibly dire financial situations.

Van de Kamp Nohl’s riches-to-rags tale details how JS stock once “literally made thousands of employees millionaires,” allowing for countless early, cushy retirements. But after too many years filled with too many managerial errors in judgment to list here—along with industry-wide changes that have made media jobs a whole lot less cushy in recent years—the stock’s value plummeted to disastrously worthless levels. Writes Van de Kamp Nohl:

For three generations, the stock did seem blessed. Then, in response to new financial challenges, CEO and Chairman Steve Smith decided to lead the privately owned company and its internally controlled stock plan into the deep waters of the publicly traded stock market. Standing on the dais of the New York Stock Exchange in September 2003 and “beaming his cheeks off, bad teeth and all,” as one ex-columnist jibes, Smith took the company from Main Street to Wall Street.

Smith would later call it his greatest accomplishment. Yet over the next five and a half years, Journal Communications Inc. stock lost 97.6 percent of its value. When the market hit bottom on March 9, 2009, it took nearly six shares (trading at 36 cents each) to buy the Sunday paper.

The stock has recovered some of its value since then, but it has already shattered lives. Almost half of the 4,158 people employed by Journal Communications when it went public have lost their jobs. “A lot of people are really, really hurting,” says Marie Rohde, a reporter for more than 30 years.

And the story just gets worse from there. Though the JS reported this week that profits were up during its second quarter, you might want buy a newspaper or two once you’re finished reading just in case.