The Collapse of Newspapers

A lot has been written about the collapse of newspapers, blaming it on everything from Craig's List to bloggers. Certainly the economic downturn is partially to blame, but consider this: A lot of newspapers that have failed or are in the process of going under, both large and small, have been publishing for well over a century.

No, there is another reason, one that the newspapers themselves try to avoid discussing, and that is the greed of their owners.

Many newspapers were family businesses with multi-generational involvement. From one generation to another, ownership was passed down. They were profitable, maybe not hugely profitable, but certainly enough to keep the owners' families in tea and crumpets and living in fine style.

And there things rested, until a couple of decades ago.

The families started selling out to ownership chains. The chains were not satisfied with profits of five or ten percent, they wanted twenty or thirty percent profits. They began doing that by combining some functions, such as shared printing plants, but they then began cutting away at their news staff, first at their bureaus in distant cities or countries. They could close a bureau and subscribe to a feed from a news service. They might not send a reporter to all of the different town meetings, or pay some gadfly who was going anyway to write a synopsis.

What they were doing, of course, was adulterating their content in the name of profit. What they did with the money they saved was use the newspapers' profits as leverage in other deals. When the economy went south, as it always does periodically, the conglomerates owning the papers found that they could not suck out the money from the papers that they needed for debt service and to prop up other parts of the conglomerates.

But there is only so much you can cut in a newspaper. You have to have reporters and a newsroom if you are to have original content, for without that, nobody needs to buy the product.

The newspapers almost all screwed the pooch on the Internet. When not a lot of people were on the Internet, some papers put almost all of their stories online. In the days of 14.4Kbs modems, that was no big deal, as nobody could be expected to read the papers online. But once broadband came about, people could read most of the news online, and millions are doing that. It is really hard to give away things for years and then tell people that you will now charge them. The New York Times tried charging online readers with something called "TimeSelect," which must have been a miserable failure as it is no longer around.

Newspapers survived radio, television and direct mail advertising. Many will survive the Internet, for someone has to generate content and the people who go out and report the news almost always work for the press.

What they may not survive is the leveraged greed of the soulless corporate scumbags who now own most of them.