Steven Rattner, a Wall Street money manager and former reporter for the New York Times wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, looking at alternative business models for the newspaper industry, an industry he says is failing to not only find new customers but to keep its existing customers. The news about newspapers could hardly be more dismal, he says, with falling circulation, repeated rounds of layoffs, disappearing ads and a chain of bad earning reports. Its an unsavory stew of ills, one that shows little prospect of becoming more appetizing.
Rattner doesnt seem to be a fan of newspapers going private that just substitutes one rapacious posse of shareholders for another equally fierce brigade of capitalists, he says. So what are the other options? Not-for-profit status might be one possibility, he says, such as the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Poynter Foundation (which also runs the Poynter Institute). He also suggests that the U.S. could somehow create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded) and then hand that out to news organizations that apply, in the same way public televsion does.
Jack Shafer of Slate says he thinks that for a capitalist, Rattners piece is short on business specifics, but from the sounds of it Shafer wishes that he had been harder on the industry. The Slate columnist says that newspapers have seen their business shrinking for at least 30 years and done nothing about it.
Rattners piece neglects to mention that for better than 50 years newspaper companies have feasted on their advertisers, charging steep ad rates everywhere and confiscatory rates wherever they owned the only daily.
Now that the Web is underselling them on the ad front and other media are stealing eyeballs, should we weep for them?
Shafer goes on to say that we should call off pledge weeks for newspapers&. and lets amend the Constitution to ban tax subsidies for newspapers. If dailies cant make it on their own, they deserve death.
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