Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/04/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 01:05 PM 4/11/2008, Harrison McClary wrote: >The loss of readership and advertising revenue is nothing new to >newspapers. Back in the early 90's when I was still working in Atlanta >for the Daily News, A New York Times paper, it was far too common to >hear of a paper somewhere closing. That was one of the first big waves >of closings, at that time most two paper towns became one. Well, first came the death of the afternoon papers. In the old days, even small US cities had a morning paper and an afternoon paper and a lot of us read both, one before we went to work and the other when we returned home. The afternoon papers suffered terminal sepsis from the Idiot Eye and went into Cheney-Stokes Breathing in the 1970's and 1980's. So, we went through 20 years of a cycle of elimination: first, the morning and afternoon papers would consolidate onto a common printing plant, with the loss of a lot of jobs, some on the press room and some editorial and some content. Then, one common company would pick up the ownership of both, normally the company owning the morning paper buying out the afternoon paper. Then they laid off the afternoon paper's editorial and content staff and just went to a VERY long production day, with one paper having two main editions, the morning and the afternoon. And then the afternoon edition was killed off. For instance, look to the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the News-Leader. Look to the Roanoke Times and the Roanoke World-News. Look to any USian city and this cycle can be seen. The consolidations allowed the morning papers to stay afloat through the 1990's but they became hard-pressed by the turn of the century. Ted has properly pointed out that the companies owning newspapers are making healthy profits but these profits do not come from their newspapers, which are bleeding wounds on the corporate balance sheets. They make their money from other sources, even down to the printing of those fund-raising calendars put out by high-school football teams and the like. Finally, bear in mind that US laws impose criminal and civil penalties on Corporate Directors and Officers who fail to take all reasonable steps to ensure a decent profit, as they are seen as fiduciaries for the stockholders. This doctrine arose when Henry Ford tried to cut the price of the Model T in 1921 and the stockholders rebelled. When the Court ruled in favor of the stockholders, Ford bought them out, took the company private, and cut the price of the Model T as he had intended, and almost ended up in bankruptcy during the boom times of the 1920's. It is not so much a matter of control by the bean-counters, as this has been the rule since at least 1900, nor a matter of "corporate greed" as it is a matter of those running the corporation feeling a natural reluctance to go to prison And folks like Elliot Spitzer only made that situation much worse. USians are oddballs on this topic. Everyone loves to gripe about the incomes enjoyed by the major US oil companies without choosing to remember that these companies are owned by the little guys: the average individual stockholder of Exxon, for instance, holds ten shares or less, and more than half of Exxon is owned by Union and Government retirement pension funds, especially teachers' unions. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!