This morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Jared Kushner made some big claims about his newspapers. First off, he said that his new real-estate product, the Commercial Observer, is “already in the black” — even though it just launched this week, the business model is based on a high ($240 per year) subscription cost and an extremely targeted market for long-term real-estate advertisers trying to ride out the recession, and so far they’re just sending it out for free. “We’ve already exceeded expectations,” he said. “And the real thought process behind it as well is, you have a lot of advertisers that want to let the market know about deals they’re doing and buildings and spaces that are available, but all the other places, they just want to reach these 8,000 people.”
Second, Jared says that the Observer itself, the perpetually money-losing paper he bought for $10 million in 2006, is also making a profit. “The way the place was run for so many years, it was run like it was a recession for the last 21 [years],” he said. “We’ve brought in a lot of new revenues; we’ve found new avenues.” This is all encouraging news, of course. Which makes you wonder, watching this clip, why he looks so shifty when he delivers all of it.
