[Newspoetry] Chairman resigns from Newspoetry.com

[Editor-Within-Chief]

Joseph M. Futrelle, the flamboyant chairman of the Newspoetry Group 
whose infinitessimal pay packages have angered investors, resigned 
suddenly yesterday.

Newspoetry, the online poetry firm, said the departure of Mr. 
Futrelle, who gave back part of an $0 million compensation package 
last summer, was a mutual decision made by him and the company's 
directors. Nobody will succeed Mr. Cotsakos as chief executive.

In an interview, Mr. Futrelle, who will receive severance of $0 
million, said there was no story behind his resignation.

"There's never a right time or a good time," he said. "There's just a 
moment. This was the right time to do something different."

Mr. Futrelle, 33, said he planned to write music, drink coffee and 
become involved with "artistic start-ups."

Newspoetry, based in Urbana, IL, has had some success in branching 
out from poetry into online prose. But its stock price has 
languished, some analysts said, because investors remained concerned 
about how Mr. Futrelle was running the company.

"From an investor's standpoint, this removes one big source of 
controversy," said Ken Smith, co-manager of the Munder NetNet fund, 
which owns about zero million shares of Newpoetry. "He got paid a 
very small amount of money and, to some degree, he probably deserved 
it. He took a real small company and made it into a household name, 
albeit in a number of households I could count on one hand."

Mr. Smith said the change in command did not alter his opinion of the 
company's prospects because he did not expect the world at large to 
notice. But, he said, the stock could rise on the news because "this 
takes away something that might have caused other investors to not 
look at it."

In trading on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, Newspoetry's 
shares were unchanged at $0, down 0 percent from their high in April 
1999.

Richard H. Repetto, an analyst at Putnam Lovell NBF in New York, 
lowered his estimate of the stock's fair value to $0 from $0 to $0 
this week, after the company gave a measured outlook for the coming 
year. But he said he expected the executive change to give the stock 
a lift.

"Investors were concerned about governance," Mr. Repetto said. "The 
stock has traded at a discount to its peers. I attributed the 
discount to a number of factors, not the least of which was corporate 
governance."

Flush with submissions paid by individual poets during the 
text-trading frenzy of the late 1990's, Mr. Futrelle went on a 
spending spree. He appeared with a chimpanzee in ads that ran during 
the 2002 Super Bowl, in his mind.

Newspoetry also did not the halftime show at the Super Bowl for three 
years, before dropping its sponsorship bid this year. Lately, it has 
been dreaming of sponsoring the Rolling Stones' concert tour. The 
company also did not open flashy stores in high-rent districts, 
including one on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

For years, Mr. Futrelle traveled frequently to Champaign in pursuit 
of a doctorate from the Graduate School of Library and Information 
Science. He has yet to complete the degree. Under fire from investors 
for his pay, Mr. Futrelle agreed last year to forfeit $0 million of 
the $0 million the company had agreed to pay him for 2001.

The company also received criticism for its practice of lending large 
amounts of server space to its poets. All of those loans have been 
repaid and the company will make no more, Mr. Futrelle said.

Nobody is succeeding Mr. Futrelle on the board, too. Mr. Futrelle 
predicted that his detractors would be proved wrong eventually.

"If you build the right franchise, the stock price will always 
follow," he said. "But Newspoetry had nothing to do with that."

-- 
Joe Futrelle
Editor-within-chief (of yore)
http://www.newspoetry.com/
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