6 Media Stocks Near 52-Week Lows

If you're aiming to "buy low and sell high," then it makes infinite sense to start your search with bargain-priced stocks. Regularly reviewing a list of stocks trading near their 52-week lows can be a great first step.

Here, I'll try to do the initial legwork for you. To prevent us from being inundated with scores of disparate companies, I'll conduct my search by industry. This will allow us to make some initial comparisons among semi-related companies.

There are 24 industry groups as defined by the Global Industry Classification Standard. Media is one of them.

Below are the top six companies in this space (by market cap) that are hugging 52-week lows.

Company	Market Capitalization (in millions)	% Change from 52-week Low	P/E Ratio (trailing)
Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI  )	$32,034	19.4%	41.1
Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH  )	$8,464	11.9%	11.6
Charter Communications (Nasdaq: CHTR  )	$3,774	13.1%	2.0
The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT  )	$1,166	13.9%	15.4
World Wrestling Entertainment (NYSE: WWE  )	$1,030	8.9%	20.4
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO  )	$261	11%	72.2

Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's. Data as of Oct. 18.

Let's get the most eye-popping number out of the way first. How the heck does cable provider Charter Communications have an earnings multiple of just 2.0? The answer is that it went through bankruptcy in 2009. The result is a non-cash accounting quirk. When you look at free cash flow, it's negative.

Other than that, Dish Network is the only other one that stands out to me. I've never been a fan of Dish because of its ugly balance sheet. Also, I always preferred the competitive chances of cable, telecom, and DIRECTV (Nasdaq: DTV  ) in the near term and Web-based options in the long term. Looking at its earnings and cash flows over the past few years, though, I'm going to revisit that assumption.

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