Who stopped the presses
I’ve said it here before: Don’t blame technology for the demise of newspapers, blame newspaper companies. As Daniel Gross reminds us to.
Note especially this graf about my current hometown paper (or what’s left of it):
In 2007, legendary real estate investor Sam Zell decided that a talent for good timing in flipping office buildings made him an expert on the ailing newspaper industry. In December 2007, he closed on the $8.2 billion purchase of the Tribune Co., which owned the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Cubs. Zell put down just 4 percent of the purchase price—$315 million—and borrowed much of the rest, leaving the company with a $13 billion debt burden. This deal was the purest expression of the “dumb money” mentality. The only hope Zell had of making a dent in the debt load and keeping current on the $800-million-plus annual interest tab was to sell off trophy properties like the Cubs, office buildings, and big-city newspapers—assets that themselves don’t throw off lots of income but whose purchase requires tons of cheap credit. Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy Dec. 8, 2008.
Uh huh. And this was after a decade of mismanagement by the Tribune people, and Times Mirror before them.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Just finished reading Fredric Brown’s 1950 classic NIGHT OF THE JABBERWOCK, about a weekly small-town paper–the kind of publication that is now boiler-plated by a syndicate for a community that has either morphed into a suburb or become a fiefdom of Wal-Mart, and it occurs to me that the small-town press was the microcosm of which the TIMES/TRIBUNE/WHATEVER is the macrocosm. I know that sounds awkward, but I really felt “canary in the coal mine” was too trite.