Recommended Reading

Today I'll point you at slacktivist where Fred tackled the question: Why don't we have a better press corps? Being Fred, and being "a cog in the machine of the MSM", he doesn't go where you might expect:

Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they're being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.

This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you've purchased newspaper stock, then you're a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.

Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper -- even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market -- is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It's safe, but humble.

Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That's what's happening right now with newspapers...

The current prevailing notion that a newspaper can or should be expected to provide similar gaudy returns is also completely irrational. The management of most newspapers and the bulk of their shareholders are repeating the exact same foolishness that destroyed all those S&Ls back in the 1980s. They are not just expecting, but demanding profit margins that the newspaper business model was never designed to provide and that it is not capable of providing.

This is the equivalent of driving 60 miles an hour in first gear. Your car might actually be capable of this. Once. Briefly. But it's still a really, really Bad Idea if you want your car to survive.

Walk into any newsroom these days and you can smell the burning transmission. You'll see only half as many reporters as were there 20 years ago and maybe a third as many copy editors. And you may notice that the remaining skeleton crew looks pretty young...

It's good stuff.