An On-the-Ground View of the Busch Deal

Usually, when The Deal assesses the business press, it's highly critical â€" even caustic. So when the publication, which focuses on mergers and acquisitions, heaps praise on anybody in the business media, it's worth paying attention to.

So it is with The Deal's assessment of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's coverage of the InBev-Anheuser-Busch merger. If you want to know all the details surrounding the deal, that's the place to go.

The Post-Dispatch's coverage, according to The Deal's Kenneth Klee, has been "smart, thorough, fair-minded and exhaustive."

But Klee's account quickly turns into a lament. This kind of coverage, he warns, may soon become a thing of the past. "We more commonly worry about cutbacks in foreign and national coverage as newspaper revenues migrate to Google and Craigslist," he writes. But "unless and until somebody figures out a business model that supports the level of local reporting that the Post-Dispatch has mustered on the Bud story, we risk becoming a society that finds it harder and harder to agree on facts and make tough decisions that people accept."