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Frederik Pohl published an article ("Golden Ages Gone Away") in 1972 about the demise of American News, which explains the liquidation of the company as follows. The company owned hundreds of warehouses, depots and truck lots in cities all over the country, purchased several decades before when real estate prices were much cheaper, and still carried on the company's books at the original purchase price. Originally built on the outskirts of city downtowns, due to the explosive growth of American cities these lots were now sitting on prime real estate and were worth many times what had originally been paid for them. The company's book value failed to reflect this, so it was possible for canny investors who realized what had happened to buy up the stock and then liquidate the company's real estate, making a large profit. With the decline of American magazine publishing after World War II the firm's magazine distributing business was simply not all that profitable any more, and the company's stock price reflected the declining profits from magazine distribution, so this all made sense.
This article would benefit from more discussion of the role ANC had in the distribution of major slick magazines like Life, Collier's and Time. From reading the article as it stands one might get the impression that they mostly distributed comic books and pulp magazines, which was hardly the case. The article is also unbalanced in devoting more attention to the death of ANC (admittedly a fascinating topic) than to what ANC was and did when it was alive. Finally, although this unavoidably involves questions of judgment, I think there needs to be some assessment (perhaps taken in the form of quotes from authoritative sources like Tebbel's The Magazine in America and Mott's A History of American Magazines) of whether the ANC monopoly was a good or a bad thing for print media in the US.--162.83.221.253 (talk) 19:39, 15 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
