A few days ago a quartet of dead tree publishers launched a meganetwork to win back ad bucks that are migrating to the social web. The value added kicker on this venture is "premium advertising" being sold to you by "trusted brands" (Hearst, Gannett,NY Times,Tribune). How much would you trust a brand that informed you that 143 million pounds of downer cow beef is being recalled, only after the Bush administration admitted that most of the meat has already been consumed? Didn't see that in the upper right quadrant of a 2x2 chart... lots of that bad burger went to Costco,In 'n Out, and Jack in the Box too. What kind of software these folks running on anyhow?

The real beef is the "are newspapers dead" question being posed here at SMT by Paul Gillen, inter alia. DARPA was founded in 1958, and their work on packet data transfer that gave birth to the internet was operational by the time Richard Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. The resulting "joint operating agreements" between newspapers sharing the same "market" in the US effectively exempted newspapers from antitrust laws, and helped some of them survive in an environment of declining circulation. Today's market is global, and the buiness environment for dead tree publishers is shake, rattle 'n roll. QuadrantOne an others of its ilk (there have been failures in the past) is part of a MSM culture that believes it it is "entitled" to be exempt from US antitrust laws. Don't know what is oligopoly comptition is... Google it.