Mr. Buffett on Newspapers
Mr. Buffett has long held himself out as a newspaper man. As a child, one of his first jobs was delivering newspapers. An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided. One of Berkshire's biggest investments in the 1970s was the Buffalo News, which it still owns.
But his view on the future of the newspaper industry is dismal. "For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price," he said. "They have the possibility of going to just unending losses."
As long as newspapers were essential to readers, they were essential to advertisers, he said. But news is now available in many other venues, he said.
Berkshire has a substantial investment in Washington Post Co. He said the company has a solid cable business, a good reason to hold on to it, but its newspaper business is in trouble.
Mr. Munger called newspapers' woes "a national tragedy....These monopoly daily newspapers have been an important sinew to our civilization, they kept government more honest than they would otherwise be."
A Washington Post Co. representative couldn't be reached for comment.
3 comments:
Losing the newspapers is a real danger for America.
If all we have is the internet, then those who control the internet content can distort nearly anything. Just ask the Chinese how that's working out for them...
And look at what's been happening at YouTube. Corporate interests come in and drown out the little guys with Google as a complicit partner in crime.
The primary search engines that people use have all sorts of hidden promotion and suppression of information, and it's not even apparent. It's insidious.
Those controlling the computers will increase their ability to monitor us and control us... shades of Orwell's 1984.
There's more than one way to lose our freedoms.
Joe, Does this convience you, that the downfall of the newspaper is not totally your fault, as you keep insisting?
anonymous 7:55, Are you trying to say that Salisbury News has absolutely nothing to do with the downfall of the Daily Times?
Granted, there are economic reasons they are hurting but you cannot deny that Salisbury News was the #1 Blog in 2008 and is clearly the #1 Blog so far in 2009. The odds of some other Blog holding the #1 popsition throughout thye rest of this year is slim to none.
Salisbury News is growing while the Daily Times is shrinking. Just what will it take for you to realize that we're taking over the market place?
Mind you, I don't want to see the Daily Times fail. My challenge as a one man show is to show them that when they refused to cover stories i the past, one man can make a difference against a corporate giant and no matter what you say, I have won the battle. There is no war here. The Daily Times pushed me into this position because they refused to cover the WWTP story. They refused to do any follow up on the Zoo. Once I saw that they had no backbone, I started Salisbury News and look where we're at today.
That's all I have to say about that.
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