
The Hard Truth at Newspapers Across America: Hedge Funds Are in Charge - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/the-hard-truth-at-newspapers-across-america-hedge-funds-are-in-charge
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vinceguidry
It almost seems as if the natural pathway for any industry is to wind up under
the control of money people almost the second unit economics are even
perceived to be turning unfavorable. But this group of people is almost
uniquely unmotivated to be responsive to public need.

Almost every day you hear stories in the news about the depredations of the
financial industry ruining people's lives, half of the time completely
unnecessarily. The LBO failures of Toys'R'Us and Clear Channel come to mind.

My intuition tells me that once they're perceived to be doomed, internal
politics wrecks these businesses far more quickly than the market does. Nobody
wants to even bother to save them, and so they go looking for a financial
wizard (necromancer?) for salvation.

The lack of vision in corporate leadership these days is just really sad.
Almost makes me long for the days of robber barons. At least they seemed
motivated to save companies and actually work towards the future rather than
just siphon off profits for yet another yacht.

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dm8
Internet disrupted the newspaper industry. Decentralization of information
happened with Internet and need for centralized information sources
(newspapers, TV networks etc.) has lost it's value.

Secondly, newspapers didn't transform themselves (especially their biz models)
for new medium. I work in monetization tools and trust me how frustrating it
is to work with media companies (especially newspapers). They need strong
CTOs/technical leaders to take right technical decisions and even if we
suggest some right way of doing something technically we get ignored since
they are all ignoring long terms gains for short term revenues. Invariably,
they will sacrifice user experience for short term revenue.

I have sympathy for them and I genuinely believe we need strong journalism
especially on local level where we need more accountability and oversight.
However, I believe missed the boat on digital transformation and now PE/hedge
funds are their to extract whatever they can get.

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dragonwriter
> Internet disrupted the newspaper industry.

It gets way to much credit for this; the terminal decline of that industry
began a couple decades before widespread public use of the internet.

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Analemma_
That's... exactly the opposite of true. Newspaper industry profits peaked in
2004.

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danso
Depends how you look at it. Newspaper profits were at their highest in that
period, but only because the industry had been ravished by radio and TV in the
past decades. By 2004, it was extremely rare for a city (other than the very
biggest) to have more than one newspaper. In past decades, most cities had
multiple newspapers, including morning and afternoon papers.

The newspapers that survived to be the only dog in town effectively had a
monopoly in classified and print ads. That's why profit margins were so huge
-- but there were far fewer players in the game.

