On May 25, 2009, at 11:50 PM, b_s-wilk wrote:
According to stats last year, 74 million people buy and read daily newspapers. That's not chump change. You really can't be well informed without reading the news. Radio, TV, Internet don't have the important details, especially for local news.
Owning a newspaper can be a very profitable business, a 10 to 15 percent ROI in good times. The problem is that the greedy conglomerates that rolled-up one newspaper after another over the last couple of decades have Wall Street sized notions of what a reasonable return on investment is. When the newspapers could not meet these nutty profitability goals (30 percent ROI), they started slashing costs. Every dollar they slashed lost them over a dollar in revenues, but they were bad at math so they kept on slashing. They slashed themselves into negative profitability. Now they blame everybody, except themselves.
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