Corporate debt is a bit like the piece of ricotta torte I had for dessert last night: it goes down very easily, but chronic overindulgence will constrict the arteries, strain the heart, and possibly even kill you. And that’s exactly what is happening to Lee Enterprises, which publishes nearly 50 daily newspapers including the North County Times in San Diego County.

Lee Enterprises swallowed a staggering amount of debt over three years ago when it bought Pulitzer Inc., publisher of more than a dozen daily papers including the St. Louis Post Dispatch, founded in 1879 by Joseph Pulitzer. That turned out to be a disastrous move, as Lee is now in grave condition. Nearly 10,000 employees may find that come April, their employer can no longer survive in its present condition.

I decided to write about Lee after a friend who works for the chain asked what I thought of the company’s finances. Management was sugarcoating things, and my friend had no idea where things stood. (Full disclosure: I worked for the Lee owned Quad-City Times in the 1990s.)

Reading the company’s Dec. 31st 10-K filing led me to the conclusion that Lee Enterprises is already dead. A balloon payment of $306 million dollars is coming due April 28 and Lee, which posted a loss of nearly three times that amount last year, has flat-out admitted that it doesn’t have the cash.

The newspaper company can’t borrow its way out of this because its lenders have put it on a strict debt diet — no more sweets for you, Lee! They can’t borrow, they don’t have the cash, so Lee is left with few options. The company could sell assets to pay down debt but there’s not much of a market these days. Another option is a debt-for-equity swap, with the lenders becoming owners of the company.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: Either institutional investors that hold the secure notes will show mercy, or a bankruptcy judge will have to carve up the company’s bloated corpse and sell off the parts.

Lee’s stock closed at 56 cents today, down from $15 a share a year ago, and many on Wall Street think it hasn’t hit bottom. Lee’s short interest, a measure of pessimism in the company’s future, is one of the highest for any publicly-traded U.S. firm.

The Davenport, Iowa-based company’s difficulties are a symptom of the pain experienced by newspaper chains that used debt to finance growth in recent years. Tribune Corp., publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, is in bankruptcy. McClatchy Corp., which loaded up on debt to buy Knight-Ridder in 2006, is struggling for survival.

When it acquired the St. Louis Post Dispatch in 2005 for $1.5 billion, Lee also assumed a $306 million debt, which is a twisted tale in itself.  Pulitzer borrowed the money in 2000 to gain control of the Post Dispatch and buy out almost all of the stake held by the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications. (Privately-held Advance owns Conde Nast, publisher of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and others, and also publishes major metro dailies in Portland, Ore., and New Orleans.)

For 16 years, Pulitzer had been paying Newhouse half of the Post Dispatch’s profits under a “joint operating agreement” with a newspaper that no longer existed. Newhouse sold the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1984, and somehow got Pulitzer to keep paying it, even after the Globe-Democrat stopped printing a few years later. (Newhouse still gets 5 percent of the Post Dispatch profits.)

The bad news doesn’t end in April because the Putlitzer debt just keeps on dealing out pain. The $306 million is only the principal on the loan, which carries 8.05 percent interest annually. So the total bill is more than $600 million. And counting.

That’s the story of how a bad deal to buy out one newspaper chain is about to destroy two others.

Thomas Medvetz, The San Diego Union-Tribune:

Since the false premises and reckless mismanagement of the Iraq war have become widely known, there has been a great deal of soul-searching about the content of our public debate. But in my view the problem with this soul-searching is that, like the discussion above, it tends to reduce very quickly to a tallying of individual credit and blame rather than an examination of the profound misfirings of institutions. A postgame score card is no substitute for genuine inquiry into the deeper rules of public debate, which at present tend to ensure victory to the holders of the loudest megaphone over the bearers of evidence, to broadcast ratings over journalistic integrity, and to vigorous flag-waving over rigorous analysis.

My piece last week on the “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West” DVD that was handed out in political swing states a month before the election provoked some interest here and here.rent a car bulgariaТюмень ландшафт The Guardian, based in London, quoted me as saying:

“Clarion was thinking of more creative ways to use newspapers than newspapers were,” Seth Hettena, a reporter who investigated the film for the Columbia Journalism Review, said.

Hettena described the free DVDs as “fall[ing] into a grey area, at the very least”. He cited the timing of the newspaper adverts, their distribution to 14 US states where voters are split on the presidential race, and Clarion’s ability to keep its donors secret under the tax laws.

The Altantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg said that Aish HaTorah, the group behind “Obsession,” is “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today.”

I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it “Obsession” as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.

Who paid to distribute 22 million copies of “Obsession” via newspaper? We still don’t know.

My piece about the documenary “Obsession” is up on CJR. If you haven’t heard about this film, then you probably don’t live in a political swing state. More than 20 million copies of this film were distributed last month by newspaper

Who’s behind this? No one really knows.

With apologies to The Washington Post.

This is Playoff Week. That, in reality, is about all that anyone knows outside Terry Francona’s inner, inner circle — that sometime in the next week the Boston Red Sox General Manager will announce his pitching lineup against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Beyond that, the baseball world is in a zone of fevered speculation.

Nothing is certain, and one sign of how jittery everyone is about the timing and the choice came a few hours ago, when the gossipy PROSportsDaily.com posted an item that said, “Paper: Red Sox may announce pitching lineup in AM.” That set off alarms in newsrooms across the country until the team’s front office shot it down — although it was not clear exactly what they were shooting down, other than that the announcement would come early this morning.

There was a widespread assumption, based on nothing solid from the campaign, that Francona could make his announcement this morning, this afternoon, or stage a multi-day rollout. Now, in a twist that goes against recent history, there are signs that Francona may wait to announce his choice until this weekend or just before game one on Monday in hopes of providing a big boost before the series opens.

In addition to giving some playoff-eve energy to the Red Sox, a late-in-the-week rollout would have another benefit in the eyes of his loyalists. It could help overshadow the other dominant story heading into the playoff, which is the long-running drama involving Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz and his girlfriend, Erica Ericsen, the 2007 Penthouse Pet of the year.

An announcement late in the week suggests that the Red Sox coaching staff believes that, in an era of 24/7 coverage and increasingly shortened news cycles, sustaining interest in a multi-day rollout has become increasingly difficult. Last year, Francona, the World Series winning manager, choreographed a five-day rollout of his choice of starting pitchers. Media attention spans today are considerably shorter.

Francona could move whenever he’s ready, but if he makes his announcement sooner than Friday, it would mean disrupting a schedule that is already set. He will be in Boston on Tuesday for a meeting with the coaching staff, an important event that he probably won’t want to overshadow with a pitching lineup announcement.

One possibility is Curt Schilling will get the call in game one. Schilling ….